3 Main Types of Technical Debt and How to Manage Them
An excellent software team is only possible if you properly manage your technical debt. Not paying attention to your technical debt might result in higher development costs. Therefore, it's essential to ensure you manage your technical debt properly since it will help you grow your company.
Here we will discuss types of technical debts, their causes, signs, and how you can manage them. Read on.
What is Technical Debt?
Technical debt (code debt, tech debt, or TD) occurs when your team uses shortcuts when developing software. Generally, this happens when your development team uses coding shortcuts or suboptimal design solutions because they have to speed up production. Software developers must repay this technical debt by reworking the code.
That's why if you encounter software technical debt, you should try to fix it as soon as possible. This might mean committing more to post-launch support or adjusting deadlines. Please do so to avoid things getting worse.
Why You Shouldn't Overlook Technical Debt
Generally, dealing with software technical debt is tricky since it has no specific metrics to quantify it. It's impossible to know the principal debt amount when the development team takes a shortcut and calculates the amount needed to pay off the principal and interest. Also, you can't accurately predict the resources used on technical debt with time.
The quantification of tech debt leads to ignorance. Because you cannot see a tangible loss associated with it, you might ignore it for a long time. After some time, the consequences of unattended tech debt will be felt at organizational levels. Some of the impacts of technical debt in a company include:
Technical Debt and Developers
Software engineers are the first people to feel the impact of technical debt. It impacts their productivity directly since it adds a lot of resistance when trying to move forward in the development cycle. Trying to fix issues in the current code can be challenging. If a programmer has to spend most of their time paying off debt instead of adding value to a program, they will feel demoralized. That's the reason most developers like to join companies with clean code. Therefore, high software technical debt makes an organization less appealing to new programmers and makes the existing ones look for other opportunities.
Technical Debt in Sales and Marketing
Salespeople survive on boasting about software features or the ability to deliver quickly. If too much technical debt has accumulated, there could be a lack of trust in the delivery due to the slowdown caused by technical debt. With technical debt, salespeople find it hard to run successful and profitable campaigns.
Technical Debt and Engineering Teams
Not predicting when a specific feature or product will be ready for the market affects velocity. The workflow in an organization goes differently than planned. As a result, the overall relationship between engineers and other teams is affected. Furthermore, recovering from the rut of technology debt becomes more difficult since the whole team's morale is affected.
Technical Debt and Organization
If you don't settle the technical debt, it takes little time before it reflects on the organization's performance. The management team needs help to add value to the software and allocate funds for new and existing products. It affects the revenue stream, which makes it even harder to take care of the engineering dept.
What are the Causes of Technical Debt
Technical debt may be acceptable for rapidly growing businesses that need to release a new product version to the market as soon as possible to get user feedback, test the waters, or analyze market needs. Most smaller projects have a small amount of technical debt.
However, you must be careful and learn how to manage technical debt. Otherwise, it might lead to negative consequences. The more technical debt accumulates, the more it might negatively affect your business and slow your next product release. Technical debt does not appear just by accident. There are various reasons for it. Here are some of the common causes of technical debt.
Tight Schedule
When the software development team has a strict timeline, they might not decide on the best solution. As a result, they postpone the best solution for an indefinite time. In this approach, the modularity of the code is usually affected, thus making it difficult to make changes in the future.
Unanticipated Expenses
In most cases, the company's needs usually get in the way of software development. The development team is constantly under pressure to deliver quickly for less money. As a result, the dynamic requirements of the project result in high expenses.
Ever-Changing Technology
Technology changes every day. So, it's common for what makes sense now to stop doing so after some time. Therefore, you should keep updating your tech tools/stack since what you are using has just been outdated and become obsolete. Making unexpected shifts to relevant tech tools can be overwhelming, thus creating an imbalance in the software development environment, resulting in unforeseen technical debt. Furthermore, teams might have no option but to take shortcuts to ensure their projects are up-to-date. Such shortcuts might increase your overall technical debt.
Postponement of Refactoring
Refactoring requires some amount of time. But it can be challenging to inform your customers of the importance of refactoring. Therefore, if you constantly postpone modernization, the quality of your code might not be desirable.
Business Causes
Your company's needs may force you to adopt sub-optimal development practices. You might have pressure to release the products faster, which is the main reason behind this. Some businesses want to develop software with little money. Everything has a price. So, you trade technical debt for faster development and lower cost.
Poor Communication
Distributed teams, shifting resources, lack of experience, and poor communication can lead to technical debt. If the documentation of an idea is done correctly, people will understand how it should be accomplished and why. It is not about blaming or criticizing each other; it's more about knowing how to enhance human resource management. You are more likely to fall into technical debt if you need to learn about programming best practices.
Misunderstanding of Possible Circumstances
Sometimes you might be working with clients that need help understanding the software development process and underestimate the effect of tech debt on a project. So, they impose strict time limits or requirements to include functionalities that contradict the initial design. As a result, you might get a very far from ideal code.
Lack of Automated Tests
Another cause of tech debt is the need for end-to-end and unit tests. Sometimes developers fail to include automated tests and wait until the end of the software to test it. For this reason, it's difficult to fix errors and adopt changes that will only affect part of the project.
How Can You Identify Technical Debt?
It is simple to understand why companies accumulate excessive technical debt. Some degree of technical debt is both acceptable and inevitable. Making compromises while developing an application is expected, especially when you have to deliver within a strict timeline. However, some indications show that an organization's technical debt has crossed the line from acceptable to becoming a problem. Here are the signs to look out for, so you can take the necessary actions to manage tech debt.
Code Smells
"Code smells" are a significant software development process obstacle. This results in poor code quality, thus increasing the technical debt. However, facing code smell doesn't destroy the application completely. Rather, it slows down the processing time of software. An example of code smell is when a code is duplicated all over a software. Usually, this occurs when many developers code separate parts of the same software. This can result in undesirable scenarios where programmers create and recreate the same code. Duplicated code is among the most destructive code smells. This is because it makes it difficult to maintain the code.
When the Development Team Keeps Complaining
Pay attention to any concerns from your development team. Since they encounter problems daily, they know when they will have a significant impact due to an issue. The development team can easily evaluate the friction these problems can bring to a company. So, ensure you listen to them and address the issues they are raising.
Code Complexity
Code complexity is all about the number of entities that define a software application and the relationship between them. According to most experts, code complexity is a way to identify technical debt. Some of the reasons why software engineers end up creating overly complex code include the following:
At times, programmers have to develop software within a short time, so they work under pressure. Technically, it's easier to develop unstructured and complex code than readable and clean code.
The programmers need to learn how to create quality code.
Lack of organizational process to control code complexity for a straightforward coding process. When such a thing happens, it's hard to read, reuse and maintain the source code.
Patchy User Experience
Is it taking long to bring in new users? Or is there an increase in clients' complaints at your call center? The essential thing is to ensure you monitor what your users are going through with your software. Your clients experiencing quality issues is a sign that you need to improve your software. However, most of the time, the impacts may only be felt after some time. Customer care staff may be assisting customers, salespeople might be downplaying the faults, or programmers are debugging issues as soon as they occur. Or even worse, users are giving up on your software and going for other options.
Lack of Documentation
Lack of proper documentation is another indicator of technical debt. When the documentation needs to be updated or corrected, it becomes easier to understand the software components; hence, making new modifications becomes difficult. Also, it delays the system development process since it is difficult for new programmers to take over because no guidance is available.
Examples of Technical Debt
You can find a technical debt example in an organization that usually releases its products before thoroughly testing them. This technical debt forces the developers to revisit the code to clean it up and retest it to be sure it's working as expected. For this reason, technical debt can become expensive in terms of money and time.
Another excellent example of technical debt is when the developers add new features to their programs without considering their implications. A move like this can lead to an increase in technological complexity because of poor design and architecture. As such, developers may have to invest most of their time and money to mitigate this debt.
Types of Technical Debts
Technical debt costs businesses across the US billions of dollars every year. These lingering issues can build new work for software developers, slow down projects, and even worsen with time. If you are not careful, you might not even know what happened and when it did. Being able to manage your technical debt requires more than just knowing tech debt's meaning. You need to understand that technical debt comes in various forms. There are three common types of technical debt that you should know. They include:
Deliberate Technical Debt
Usually, developers will know there is the right way to do a project and a quick way to complete it. In some cases, the quick way can be the right way. However, sometimes the team might have to do a project the "wrong" way since they have to release a product quickly into the market. Sometimes, software engineers deliberately incur technical debt to minimize time to market.
If you are taking this approach, you must consider how much time you will save on launching a feature and what it will take to repay the incurred debt. Ensure all stakeholders know that this route will inevitably affect the launching of other features. In simple terms, deliberate technical debt occurs when the developers are already aware of the shortcomings but need an immediate plan they can adapt to fix the issue.
Accidental or Outdated Design Technical Debt
Engineers should try thinking ahead and future-proofing their projects with quick delivery and simplicity when designing software. But this is a tricky balance, and only some people get it right the first time. As technology evolves and requirements keep changing, you may realize that your project needs to be fixed or new requirements have become challenging and slow to implement. A better original design will be easier to refactor, but sometimes you may have to bite the bullet and adopt a more significant refactor.
Knowing how to refactor software well is a broad topic. However, this must happen more often, at least annually, or when the software is stable. If not, you will over-engineer the software, thus incurring unnecessary slowdowns along the way. The development team and product owners should ensure they have time to resolve this kind of debt since design decisions cause it and changing requirements frequently.
Unintentional Technical Debt
This technical debt occurs from a need for deliberate monitoring and errors. One complexity or bug builds on another and another. With bugs building up, you incur debt and face severe threats to the success of your project. So, trying to avoid technical debt as much as possible is critical. A better scrum team will spend their time trying to understand the design of software, keep on improving the design and clean their code along the way. Although this sounds hectic, it's critical to follow these steps to avoid a huge debt burden that might cause problems in the future.
How to Avoid Technical Debt
How can you avoid it now that you know the definition of technical debt, its causes, examples, and types? Here are some strategies on how to deal with technical debt.
Continuous Unit Tests
Testing is an area where developers usually take shortcuts. Although testing might seem daunting and time-consuming, regular testing can save you a lot of time and effort in the future. When you don't test, you don't know whether a change in the codebase will affect your entire software. So, to prevent the issues of regression bugs, developers should conduct unit tests more often. With this approach, programmers can identify and correct errors more efficiently. This will lead to the enhancement of the overall code quality, hence reducing code debt.
Communicating Debt
One effective strategy for managing technical debt is by accepting that it exists first and sharing that info with all stakeholders. It is the responsibility of the IT team to set the tone and share with non-IT managers the actual cost of technical debt. As the IT team leader, you should inform them of the importance of paying off technical debt sooner than later.
Refactoring Regularly
Regular refactoring is another effective and noticeable way to prevent the accumulation of technical debt. Refactoring does not affect the initial structure of a code, fix bugs, or implement additional functionality. So, refactoring is unnecessary and not worth your time. However, you should know that refactoring helps remove duplicates, reduce complexity, and enhance the structure of a code. As a result, it improves your code's overall quality, making it readable, maintainable, and better functioning.
Knowledge Base Maintenance
Technically, your code will last for at least years or even decades. As a result, you can't be sure that the same specialists will maintain it. That's why it's critical to properly keep the knowledge base of roadmaps, documentation, and other essential files. The main benefit of this strategy is that programmers may access the necessary info regarding every stage of a project. This makes it easy for them to solve any arising problems faster and more efficiently.
Reduce Technical Debt With Agile Practices
Every agile practitioner knows that "done" is just a term. Once shipped to the client in the traditional software development environment, a program is complete. However, in an Agile environment, there is frequent revision, such as correcting bugs and issues that might arise when using the software. In other words, there is no "done." Agile depends on minimizing the scope of release to promote quality work. Since it embraces iterations and increments rather than a finished product, this approach can be a good way of avoiding technical debt.
The agile approach makes it easy for developers to pay off smaller pieces of technical debt. This way, technical debt isn't forgotten for better and more significant projects, hence avoiding long-term interest. Using Agile methodologies such as continuous integration (CI) and test automation will ensure the developers are constantly working on software tech debt to lessen technical debt. By strictly implementing these practices, in the end, you can avoid technical debt altogether.
Bottom Line
It is impossible to avoid all technical debt altogether. However, how you manage the debt can create an excellent overall outcome for your programs. Take your time to understand the roadmap, causes, signs, and types of technical debt you might incur during the development cycle. Then try to monitor and manage technical debt as it appears to avoid accumulating too much over time. To learn more, schedule a discovery call with Mach One Digital today.