As a business owner in the current world, you simply cannot risk having technical debt. This may sound like an uncommon term, but you have surely faced it at least a few times in your organization.
It lowers productivity, takes too much of your time and effort in fixing the technical bugs, lowers employee morale, and costs you a lot. If you want to think for the long term and come up with a strategic approach for efficiency in the long run, you should be prepared to manage tech debt.
There are plenty of effective ways you can do that. To learn more, make sure to read till the end of this article!
What is Technical Debt?
Technical debt, also known as tech debt or code debt, refers to the gap between a quickly implemented solution and its long-term quality or efficiency. It can arise due to several factors including badly written codes, ineffective and inefficient processes, and old systems.
Facing technical debt does not always cause direct problems for a business. However, you will have to prolong time in repairing the systems, face slowed development and innovation, and eventually will end up spending more than you would if you had opt for tech debt management.
Where Does Technical Debt Come From?
There is more than just one cause of the rise of technical debt. Some of the major ones are:
Time Pressure
Rushed decision-making to meet the deadline can often result in technical debt. Time pressure is common in active organizations that are looking to satisfy the immediate technical demand rather with functionality in mind than quality. In their path to getting a quick fix, enterprises may face issues due to inefficient codes or buggy systems.
Lack of Strategy
When there is no proper strategy to implement fixes for technical debt, it only tends to grow. Sometimes, a lack of strategy can lead to temporary short-term fixes, but the solutions made in a short time without strategies don’t work in the long run.
An example of this could be the addition of new features without thinking about how they’ll fit into the larger system architecture could end up in a code base that is weak and disorganized.
Budget Constraints
Technical teams who are forced to lower their budgets will come up with different ways to fix technical bugs temporarily and on a budget. This often leads to them spending more in the long run while still not being able to address and fix the technical debt that keeps increasing.
Rapid Technological Changes
The programming languages, frameworks, and tools are always changing. An example of such changes would be new frameworks like React or Vue which are often hard to combine with a system that was developed using an outdated version of JavaScript. These systems should either be rewritten or should undergo an expensive renewal.
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Why It Matters?
Checking technical debt matters more than it may seem on the surface level due to several reasons:
Decreased Efficiency
Businesses that are always looking to avoid a long-term fix of tech debt will spend more time and effort fixing the tech errors and vice versa. This has been proven by a study by McKinsey & Company. When companies overlook the importance of recovering technical debt, they spend more time fixing bugs and errors which decreases efficiency.
Increased Costs
The frequency of fixing technical debt will be more than implementing proper tech debt management. This often leads to increased costs in such debts as such errors rise more often than not when a long-term fix is avoided.
A study revealed that the largest IT companies find tech debts to be a major threat and hence spend one-third of their budget on fixing them.
Reduced Innovation
Constantly fixing technical errors will take time for innovation from businesses. Hence, ignoring tech debt can result in a lack of innovation and regular increased hassle.
How To Eliminate Technical Debt?
Eliminating technical debt is possible with reliable strategies. Though it may not be possible to avoid them completely, you can reduce them by following the key steps:
Identifying Technical Debt
A company can identify technical debt by evaluating current codebases, finding out-of-date tools, and examining procedures. Knowing what has been slowing the system paying attention to poorly designed schemas can be considered identification of tech debt.
Prioritizing Issues
When you ignore the issues and settle for temporary solutions, you are only increasing technical debt. To eliminate the debt, you have to first give the problems your priority. You cannot expect to see your technical business goals become reality without prioritizing what’s wrong in the system.
Updating and Modernizing Systems
Businesses should not always rely on older systems with the motive to save costs. You will only be inviting heavier tech debts. Timely updating and modernizing systems can help build a scalable organization like Adobe which has moved a number of its products to a cloud-based architecture.
Rewriting and refactoring from scratch can be deemed a good example of updating and modernizing systems. Doing this will have a longer positive impact on the tech aspects of your business than opting for short-term, easier solutions.
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...Technical Debt Audit
Reviewing an organization’s IT systems, procedures, and codebase for improvement and to check inefficiencies is known as a technical debt audit. The main motive of such an audit is to get rid of tech debts.
What is An Audit And Why Is It Necessary?
An audit helps in making methodical assessments of systems while identifying hazards and making decisions on adjustments. You can easily learn about process optimization, highlight areas for improvement, and reveal hidden technical debt with the help of an audit.
Main Areas Of Audit
The main areas of audit are as follows:
- Source Code Quality: A thorough audit evaluates the maintenance, complexity, and required compliance of the code.
- System Architecture: To avoid long-term inefficiencies, assess the system architecture for scalability and reasonable mutual dependence.
- Software Development Processes: To guarantee quality and speed, examine procedures like automated testing, CI/CD, and documentation.
- Tools and Technologies: To ensure a continuous meeting of company needs, review the tools and technologies like SonarQube and CodeClimate regularly.
Gap Analysis And Remediation Plan
Enterprises can move towards analyzing the gaps they’re facing after identifying the many areas of technical debt. Gap analysis helps companies recognize where they are lagging behind and further come up with necessary remediation plans.
How To Identify Gaps In An IT System?
You can identify the gaps in the IT system by examining the development procedures, code quality, and system architecture. The gaps could be inadequate technology, ineffective procedures, or poor coding.
Reviewing tools and frameworks used for the development process can help in identifying the gaps. Likewise, mapping processes and systems improves the analysis of system relationships, data flows, and workflows.
Creating An Action Plan
After finding the gaps, businesses should create an action plan or remediation plan to overcome the issues they’re facing technically. The following are some ways you can create a reliable plan:
- Short-Term Improvements: When you make a plan through short-term improvements, it does not always have an impact in the long run or in major ways. But, it will temporarily and for a short period improve the user experience, security, and system performance.
Refactoring important code segments, addressing urgent issues, or putting in place better logging and monitoring systems are some examples.
- Long-term Strategies for Reducing Technical Debt: Coming up with long-term strategies for reducing technical debt will help not just in getting over current debt but also in avoiding the ones that may arise in the future.
Some examples of such strategies include switching to accessible platforms, implementing continuous development and automated examination, or designing a more modular system (such as microservices).
- Implementing Monitoring to Prevent New Technical Debt from Accumulating: This strategy focuses on finding the metrics that will help avoid future technical debts. Frequent monitoring helps your team recognize new debts as soon as they arise.
Implementing monitoring to prevent new tech debt might involve performance monitoring, automatic analysis of static code (using SonarQube or similar tools), and high-priority bug updates.
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...Conclusion
For companies to stay ahead of their competitors, scale up, and grow, managing technical debt is a must. You cannot expect to remain competitive while achieving your organizational goals by simply just cutting technical budgets. Using strategies to manage tech debt may not be as cheap as temporary fixes in the shorter term but they’ll be much more effective and affordable in the long run.
Moreover, an enterprise will have more time for innovation, can work efficiently, and remain under a budget given they have also specified costs for timely management of technical debt. Many organizations view this debt as a burden and an obstacle to their growth, but it should simply be perceived as a way of growing organizations, keeping them ahead of the competitors, and a source of investment for better operations now and in the future.
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