ITIL4-CDS Create, Deliver and Support Practice Question
Which practice is most effective in managing 'Technical Debt' in a fast-paced CDS environment?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often think technical debt should be addressed only during major rewrites or ignored until it causes failures, rather than managed continuously.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Including technical debt tasks in the team's regular backlog.
Managing technical debt requires a balanced approach. By treating technical debt as a 'first-class' item in the backlog—just like features—the team ensures it is prioritized regularly. This avoids the catastrophic impact of legacy issues while maintaining a healthy velocity. It allows for intentional decisions about when to incur debt and when to pay it off, ensuring that the service remains sustainable, performant, and reliable for the long term.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Ignoring technical debt until the system performance drops significantly.
Why it's wrong here
Reactive management is dangerous. Technical debt, when ignored, accumulates, making the system harder to maintain and prone to failures. By the time performance drops, the cost of addressing the debt is often much higher, potentially leading to major service outages and a significant loss in business productivity.
- ✓
Including technical debt tasks in the team's regular backlog.
Why this is correct
Treating debt as a regular backlog item ensures it is visible and prioritized alongside features. This prevents the accumulation of unmanaged debt and allows the team to plan for remediation as part of their standard workload, maintaining system quality without stopping the delivery of necessary business functionality.
- ✗
Outsourcing the remediation of technical debt to a third-party team.
Why it's wrong here
Outsourcing debt remediation is ineffective because the external team lacks the context of the system architecture. Furthermore, the knowledge gained from refactoring stays with the external team, not the internal team, leaving the internal developers without the insights needed to prevent similar debt from recurring in the future.
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Setting a policy that forbids any code changes that might create debt.
Why it's wrong here
Zero-debt policies are unrealistic and stifle innovation. Sometimes, incurring debt is necessary to meet urgent business deadlines. The goal is not to eliminate debt entirely, but to manage it deliberately. A rigid policy would prevent the team from delivering value when it is needed most, hindering business growth.
About these practice questions
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official PeopleCert/AXELOS exam blueprint
This ITIL4-CDS practice question is part of Courseiva's free PeopleCert/AXELOS certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the ITIL4-CDS exam.