TLDR;
Do you recognize yourself in the picture above? Or perhaps it's something new to you? Either way, this post is for you, regardless of your role in IT. Throughout my career, I've encountered Technical Debt numerous times, studied various approaches to managing it, and took part in the implementation of different solutions. Now, I'm eager to share these insights with you.
What is Technical Debt?
Technical Debt is a metaphor introduced by Ward Cunningham that compares the cost of development to the cost of borrowing money.
Continuing with the metaphor, we can split Technical Debt into two parts:
The Debt: The original money you borrowed. This includes all the important work you put off, such as refactoring existing code, updating dependencies, and updating documentation, in favor of delivering features faster.
The interest: The interest you pay on a loan that grows over time. This is the extra work you have to do now because of the Debt. It's harder to connect systems, data gets messy, and you need workarounds. This slows down delivery and costs more money.
Okay, so we understand the idea of Technical Debt. Let's summarize it using more Technical terms:
Technical Debt represents the future costs and complexity that result when we intentionally or unintentionally choose quick solutions over better-designed approaches to software development.
Shades of Technical Debt.
Reading the definition, you may ask what I mean by "intentional or unintentional"?
Well, sometimes we are not aware of possible Debt due to a lack of experience or knowledge. These two terms are mostly about awareness of debt.
Diving deeper into the shades of Technical Debt I want to refer to Martin Fowler's Technical Debt Quadrant,
we can see that it is divided into four sections: Deliberate (Intentional), Inadvertent (Unintentional), Reckless, and Prudent.
Let's break it down:
Reckless/Deliberate Debt happens when the team underestimates the consequences of the fast solution.
Reckless/Inadvertent Debt happens when the team is not aware of the Debt because of a lack of knowledge or experience.
Prudent/Deliberate Debt is when the team is aware of the Debt, and care about it.
Prudent/Inadvertent Debt is when the team is not aware of the Debt.
You might say, isn't Prudent/Inadvertent Debt is the same as Reckless/Inadvertent Debt? Well, not exactly.
The difference is that as soon as the Prudent team discovers unintentional Technical Debt, they take action to fix it,
whereas the Reckless team does not.
Continuing to learn about the shades of Technical Debt, let's discuss the areas in which Technical Debt can occur.
- Code Debt: Represents poor coding practices, a lack of standardization, and outdated techniques. It hinders maintenance and scalability.
- System Design Debt: Results from bad or outdated architecture or design, including overly complex designs, misuse of patterns, and lack of modularity. This Debt hinders scalability and adds new features.
- Documentation Debt: Involves insufficient or outdated documentation, making it difficult for team members to understand the system and decision rationale, impacting maintenance and development efficiency.
- Testing Debt: This occurs when there is insufficient testing, including unit tests, integration tests, and overall test coverage. This increases the risk of defects and bugs in production, leading to system failures and customer dissatisfaction.
- Infrastructure Debt: Outdated servers, poor deployment practices, or lack of disaster recovery plans, leading to performance issues and downtime.
- Technical Skills Debt: Results from lacking necessary skills or knowledge, leading to suboptimal solutions. Mitigate by investing in training and development.
- Dependency Debt: Using outdated or unsupported libraries, frameworks, or tools, leading to security risks and integration issues.
- Process Debt: Inefficient or outdated development processes, poor communication, lack of agile practices, and insufficient collaboration tools.
- Skills Debt: Results from lacking necessary skills or knowledge, leading to suboptimal solutions. Provide training and development opportunities to shift your team from Reckless/Inadvertent to Prudent/Deliberate.
Another important shade of Technical Debt is the size of it. It can be small, medium, or large.
- Small: easy to fix, usually takes up to few hours, rarely one day. The Boy Scout rule works well here: leave the code cleaner than you found it.
- Medium: can be fixed by one sprint or during feature development that involves a part of the application or system that has tech Debt. This one requires more careful development cycle planning because the team needs to allocate time to update dependencies and improve code structures.
- Large: To tackle this one, the team needs to plan way ahead because the solution may involve a complete system redesign or overhaul. A quarterly planning meeting is a good place to discuss such issues. Show the roadmap affected(slowed down) features, show how much time it takes to fix it, and how much time it will save in the future.
Why is it important to manage Technical Debt?
According to the McKinsey research, actively managing Technical Debt can free up engineers to spend up to 50% more
time on work that supports business goals. For instance, the CIO of a leading cloud provider noted that by reinventing
their Debt management, they reduced the time engineers spent addressing Technical Debt from 75% to 25%, significantly
enhancing their operational capabilities.
Stripe also researched this topic. Their report, The Developer Coefficient: Software engineering efficiency and its $3 trillion impact on global GDP, found that annual global GDP (Gross Domestic Product) losses from developer inefficiency amount to ~$300 billion. Impressive, isn't it?
Another important aspect is that Technical Debt is not spread evenly. Like a poorly maintained building, some parts of a system may be in excellent condition while others are falling apart. For example, core business logic might be well-structured and maintained, while supplementary features accumulate significant Debt. This uneven distribution makes it crucial to identify and prioritize areas where Technical Debt poses the greatest risk to system stability, maintainability, or business growth.
And the last thing that I'd like to mention is that Technical Debt accumulates interest over time. The longer you wait to address it, the more it will cost you in the future. It's like a snowball rolling down a hill, getting bigger and harder to stop.
How to deal with Technical Debt.
Here are some steps to help you manage Technical Debt:
Acknowledge and Identify Technical Debt.
This must be done at the business level, otherwise it will be hard to get resources to fix it. It is the responsibility of the team to communicate it to the business, clarify the impact, and propose solutions. Make sure you are using business terms when talking to the business. In this case metaphor of Technical Debt will serve you well here. Don't forget to add new terms to the company glossary so you speak the same language. If you don't have one, it is time to create one.Measure and Prioritize.
Use metrics to quantify Technical Debt, such as code complexity, bug rates, performance bottlenecks, or business risk. Prioritize tasks based on their impact on system stability, performance, or business goals. If you require more specific tools try CodeScene or look for similar approaches.-
Make Technical Debt Part of Engineering Work.
- General recommendations: Allocate time in every development cycle to address Technical Debt. Include Tech Debt tasks in the backlog and prioritize them alongside new features. Apply the Boys Scout rule: leave the code cleaner than you found it. Also, worth mentioning that regular code review and pair programming often prevent Technical Debt.
- Personal recommendations: There is no silver bullet here. You must adapt technical debt resolution to your development process. Many organizations run dedicated technical debt sprints, while others prefer setting aside one or two days every few weeks. Another approach is to include technical debt work in feature estimates. Alternatively, teams might track debt through special epic tickets or labels in their project management system. A few companies even use specialized tools for debt management. Find what works best for your team - there's no one-size-fits-all solution.
Automate and Improve Processes. Use tools for code quality analysis such as static analysis and linters, automated testing, and CI to have fast feedback and catch issues early.
Create a Sustainable Culture. Encourage a culture of continuous improvement, knowledge sharing, and collaboration. Invest in training and development to keep skills up to date and increase awareness of Technical Debt shifting the team from Reckless to Prudent.
Track Progress and Iterate. Regularly review and update Technical Debt metrics by organizing regular meetings to revisit previous progress and plan future improvements.
Conclusion.
In conclusion, Technical Debt is a common challenge in software development that can slow down delivery, increase costs, and limit innovation. If a team manages their Technical Debt, they can improve system stability, maintainability, and overall productivity. It's essential to be aware of Technical Debt, measure and handle it, make it part of engineering work, and track progress over time.
References.
- Wikipedia: Technical Debt
- Understanding Technical Debt
- Breaking Technical Debt's vicious cycle to modernize your business
- Tech Debt: Reclaiming tech equity
- The Developer Coefficient
- Tech debt metaphor maximalism
- How to Deal with Tech Debt: Lessons learned from the best engineering teams - Alexandre Omeyer
- Prioritizing Technical Debt as If Time & Money Matters • Adam Tornhill • GOTO 2022
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