What is Technical Debt?

Developers must balance between developing the perfect software or system against putting forward good code. With clean code, there is a scope for future innovations and iterations with ease. But in the real world, some limited resources and deadlines result in developers needing help to develop a perfect product.

And this is where the technical debt comes into the picture, as the idea is to consider the tradeoff between deadlines and perfect products. While, like money, it is okay to incur some technical debt, it should be within the limits.

The concept of technical debt refers to the debt of extra development work, which comes up later because of mediocre development work. The mediocre or the first iteration of the code that is usually poorly designed, redundant, and useless is referred to as cruft.

Ward Cunningham, the founder of Agile, initialized the concept of technical debt. Technical debt is a trade-off between short-term benefits through rapid delivery against long-term value. Just like other debts, technical debt can also accrue interest with time. The interest here is the increasing challenge and difficulty of making changes at a later stage, considering software projects have a domino effect across phases.

What Are the Causes of a Technical Debt?

Technical debt usually occurs when the developers choose sub-optimal or easy solutions or codes. It refers to taking shortcuts in software development to hit a short-term goal. But the developers must fix the code in the future as the solution is temporary and will hinder innovation and further development.

Some common reasons companies opt for technical debt are as follows.

• Continual changes in the business goals make the solution obsolete.

• Insufficient or improper information on finding the best solution and creating quick solutions for short-term benefits.

• Unclear definition during the development and design process to save time.

• Stringent deadlines or pressure to release the product immediately over proper completion.

• No knowledge of technical debt resulting in wrong decisions.

• Evolution of technology and not jumping on the modernization wagon.

• Unavailability of testing and code documentation.

• Poor or inadequate tech leadership and improper collaboration between teams.

• Issues with budget and resource allocation.

• Unclear processes and no culture around best coding practices with insufficient emphasis on testing.

What are the Different Types of Technical Debt?

Technical debts can be divided into four types based on intent, reckless, deliberate, prudent, and inadvertent. Combining them provides different kinds of technical debts. Together these four form a quadrant of different types of technical debt, and it is critical to avoid the left side for the most negligible impact.

Deliberate & Reckless: It happens when the development team knows they will enter technical debt and continue without looking at the consequences. Though the decision is taken intentionally, the approach could be better, resulting in chaotic outcomes in the future.

Deliberate & Prudent: Like the previous type, teams know they are getting into technical debt. Still, before moving ahead, a proper analysis is done for all possible consequences. And if the team considers that the technical debt will pay off, they move forward with the early release.

Inadvertent & Reckless: It is the most dangerous technical debt that one can accrue. Here team needs to pay more attention to the solution they are implementing because of the need for more experience. And the best way to avoid this is to employ experienced developers who know about dealing with code debt.

Inadvertent & Prudent: It is a controlled case where the tech team uses its knowledge to apply the best practices while developing the software. They know they are getting into technical debt because of coding mistakes. However, they prepare for multiple cases and do their analysis; implementation codes can still have bugs and room for improvement.

What is the Impact of Technical Debt?

Not all technical debts are unintentional or bad, as sometimes they help you achieve a larger goal and hence can be overlooked. For example, the urge to push products faster to the market while using lean development methods has often resulted in companies believing that having technical debt is okay. Though true, leaving it unattended for an extended period can significantly impact many issues. Below are some significant consequences that technical debt can have on your business.

Improper Code Design

When the developers opt for the dirty and quick approach to completing the project within the deadline, they skip different protocols and standards of writing clean codes resulting in a structural mess. Mistakes and practices like using different coding styles throughout the project or not properly stringing the code modules can significantly impact the future. When another developer picks up the code, they will face many challenges.

Delay in Overall Progress

When the tech debt goes beyond control, the development team must spend time repaying the interest rather than working on critical features or new updates. And instead of developing recent changes, the teams work for hours to fix the dirty code while trying to clear the technical debt. And this results in the advancement of the product and a subsequent delay in the project.

Issues with Testing

As the deadline approaches, the testing team may accelerate the testing process. And they can skip or miss various tests while being in a hurry. And this results in technical debt as the development team has to get back and work on the forgotten things eventually. Rushed or minimal testing can hurt the product. Moreover, accumulating technical debt for some time can result in a snowball effect, thus straining the testing and development teams.

Impact on Productivity

Accumulating technical debt results in decreased productivity while also delaying output. The pressure on the development teams as they spend most of their time repaying the technical debt can negatively impact them. Moreover, it will also delay other new projects and enhancements. Thus, the technical debt slows the build time and the overall development cycle.

Issues with Resources

In some situations, the developers are unwilling to work on obsolete technologies as they aspire to work with new technologies. And it becomes a challenge to replace the developer who earlier worked on the same code and understands it. Furthermore, as the codes with technical debt are unclear, the developer’s aspiration to work on them reduces significantly, making it difficult for organizations to find people who can work to repay the technical debt.

How to Ensure You Minimalize the Technical Debt?

The impact of technical debt can be significant on the overall business. Thus, it is critical to ensure that it doesn’t keep accumulating and that steps are taken to minimalize it.

Go for Refactoring

The best and most straightforward way to minimalize the technical debt is to ensure a regular refactoring exercise happens at regular intervals. Having initiatives like a dedicated refactoring week will allow your development team to look at the current architecture and code, fix bugs, and prepare the architecture for the future.

Moreover, it will also enable the developers to assess the code properly before implementing any new feature and thus is an excellent technique for removing large chunks of debt. Finally, regular refactoring can help reduce code complexity and remove duplicates and other issues.

Build a Culture of Code Reviews

Today code reviews have taken a backseat in the overall development cycle but can be highly beneficial. Nowadays, code reviews only happen when issues are reported, or bugs are reported, but they can be conducted without such scenarios. Having the developers review the code and provide feedback can be highlight beneficial. Code reviews can help with many benefits, like building a sense of collective ownership, knowledge and experience transfer, and lesser bugs or performance issues.

Integrate Automated Testing

Automated testing has become an integral part of today’s software development cycle. It is an excellent way of identifying defects and issues in the code at the earliest possible stage. Moreover, the automated testing will also provide comprehensive coverage letting the developers know about things that had problems earlier. Automated testing helps in enhancing the quality and also helps with other practices that help in improving the quality.

Focus on the Right Metrics

Development metrics are critical, but different teams often track the wrong ones. Choosing and monitoring the right metrics will help better acknowledge and pay off the technical debt. Metrics such as the below can help in the best results.

• Lead time

• Cycle time

• Number of deployments per day

• Cumulative flow

• Defect escape rate

Go for Pair Programming Whenever Possible

Using pair programming as an alternative to code reviews is also okay. When multiple developers perform it, it will also help with the same results. It is one of the best ways to produce the best-quality code and software while working as a team. Some of the significant benefits of pair programming are that it helps keep the feedback cycles short, supports the design simple, and facilitates sharing of experience and knowledge.

Pay Attention to Your Engineers

If you aim to improve the quality of the software or product, you should always pay attention to what the developers are saying. This is because they will be working on the development and thus have a good grasp on what can go wrong and what can be done for improvement. So focus on what they are saying and take their suggestions.

Identify and Resolve the Root Cause

Maintaining the habit of analyzing and resolving the root cause is one of the most challenging things. But it is one of the most important and effective ways to reduce technical debt. To minimize technical debts, it is critical to dig deeper and understand the root cause of the issues. For example, the root cause can be organizational or cultural. Resolving them will help with the current problems and the future accumulation of technical debts.

Final Thoughts

As highlighted, technical debt can make your team slower as the project progresses. Moreover, it can also result in more bugs and thus make adding new features difficult while demotivating the developers.

Technical debt is a metaphor, but the financial loss you will incur will be real. Thus, minimizing technical debt should be one of the goals if you want to keep your team happy while ensuring that you do not waste any value.