But there's no way your team can get it all done of course, so a certain amount of stuff gets skipped and pushed into the technical debt account.
What is your development culture like in regards to technical debt - is accumulating debt encouraged? Is there a huge amount of technical debt or a minimal amount?
Does the amount of technical debt concern you?
When dealing with a technical-debt-laden code base, it's important to communicate to the people who set the priorities that changes become more time consuming and buggy as the code continues to be added upon. I did this at my last job and they understood the risks and impacts. They determined that they would give me the time to make changes, but not to refactor. My estimates just got longer and longer and business went on as usual. At least I wasn't held to unrealistic deadlines.
We allocate about 10-15% of items in each sprint to technical debt.
I would not say that tech debt is encouraged. And it would concern me if large amounts of technical debt is being accumulated.
The amount of technical debt we have shipped dwarfs the GPD of a small country.
The legacy project I've been moved onto: Dave Ramsey couldn't save it.