Drowning in Technical Debt?
Ready to start tackling your technical debt? Contact us today for how we can help you dig out from the pile of Technical Debt that is holding your business back.
Let's start with first understanding a little about Technical Debt from the perspective of your business. Technical Debt is the cumulative effect of code changes, or technical decisions that add complexity to the existing software architecture. This complexity can include poor code structure, insufficient testing, and other issues that may have been caused by rushed estimates and decisions. When these issues are not addressed in a timely manner, they become harder to manage and can lead to costly delays in product delivery.
As Technical Debt builds up, it begins to have serious financial implications for your business. Technical debt that is not addressed can result in slower development cycles, higher operational costs, fewer feature requests, limited scalability, and hindered innovation. It can also lead to decreased customer satisfaction as customers experience bugs and slow response times due to poorly written code. In addition, it increases maintenance costs as developers must continually fix problems caused by earlier shortcuts.
By actively managing your Technical Debt, you can ensure that your product remains competitive in the market while also minimizing costly delays in development cycles. With proper planning and execution, you can reap the benefits of lower maintenance costs, faster product delivery times, improved customer satisfaction, scalability and innovation.
Now that you know a little about what Technical Debt is, has your business been avoiding Technical Debt? Identifying and addressing Technical Debt can be an important step in improving your product's performance, scalability and customer satisfaction. With the right strategies in place, you can manage Technical Debt for the long-term benefit of your business.
Take the time to understand how Technical Debt might be impacting your software development process so that you can start taking steps towards remedying it. It may seem daunting at first but with the right strategies in place, managing technical debt is something that any business can do successfully. Start implementing best practices today and watch as your competitors struggle to catch up!
Piling on The Technical Debt
Your business moves at a rapid pace so it’s no surprise that the software development required to support your business does as well. Your software development teams, if practicing Agile, are constantly Sprinting to get things done. These teams are driven by the requirements and deadlines around making money for your business.
Each day you have new ideas and requirements to improve the experience for your customer or your business. Your business and customer are never short of ideas or new features for the software you are building. This rapid pace does not leave much extra time for your software development teams. The time that they could use to clean up the code that was written in the previous weeks and months. The code that was perhaps over-architected or the code that was dodged because it was hard to test. These technical decisions create duplication and a pile of spaghetti code over time. This constant neglect or inability to tend to this clean up, adds to the backlog of your software development teams, creating a mound of Technical Debt.
Hidden Costs of Avoidance
These shortcuts and assumptions help your software developers iterate quickly and provide solutions for your business’s requirements. These shortcuts, if left unaddressed, add to the growing Technical Debt. This technical debt bogs down systems, crashes software, and causes multi-month delays in software releases. These delays slow your business’s effectiveness and begin to erode the relationship between your business and the software development teams. The software development teams are no longer viewed as fast and effective. These feelings lead to assumptions of ineffectiveness or an overall inability to deliver.
Unfortunately, many businesses feel that spending time managing their Technical Debt is a waste of time and money. This mindset could lead to costly technical surprises. Unforeseen technical issues sometimes halt production systems in their tracks. Addressing an issue at this stage costs businesses far more to fix than they would if they have addressed them in a more strategic method.
Instagram experienced this early on when it initially launched its iPhone app, running its operations off a single server in Los Angeles. But after an onslaught of traffic nearly crashed the server, Instagram pivoted in three days to an EC2-hosted database, adding additional resources to keep them moving. Co-founder Mike Krieger compared the transfer to open-heart surgery, and he now works to preemptively address technical debt before it leads to catastrophe.
Paying Back the Technical Debt
Depending on the amount of accumulated Technical Debt, there are multiple approaches to identifying and beginning to pay down your Technical Debt. We have seen some different approaches in our past experiences.
Some of these approaches include:
Regular Code Reviews: This is an internal process that should be part of your development team’s workflow. Having code reviews regularly helps to identify the areas where your software is suffering from technical debt. This can help reduce future issues and aid in more strategic approaches to solving problems faster.
Refactoring: Regularly refactoring the codebase can improve its readability, modularity, extensibility, and maintainability. Doing so results in a better-structured codebase that any developer on the team can easily understand and work with efficiently.
Establishing Performance Standards: Designing performance standards provides developers with guidelines for what type of performance they should expect out of their applications. This helps developers write better code and identify areas of technical debt before they become major problems.
Automation: Automated tests are essential for identifying issues in the codebase. They can scale with the application and provide feedback about potential areas of technical debt early on, before it becomes a bigger issue.
Technical Debt should not be avoided or ignored. It is important to recognize that Technical Debt is an inevitable by-product of software development and, if left unchecked, can lead to significant costs down the line for your business. To avoid this, businesses need to have systems in place for regularly identifying and paying off their Technical Debt as soon as possible. Doing so can help improve performance, reduce costs, and ensure the system is better maintained. With the right strategies and processes in place, businesses can reduce Technical Debt and keep their software development teams running smoothly.
Ready to eliminate your technical debt?
At Mach One Digital, we understand that every business is different and has its own set of unique Technical Debt. We can help your business to reduce the amount of Technical Debt by:
Identifying areas where code is over-architected or duplication exists in the code base
Providing an experienced software development team to review and address any identified Technical Debt
Implementing best practices into the software development process to reduce Technical Debt from growing in the future
Working with your team to ensure code quality and unit tests are written for each piece of functionality.
Our goal is to help your business eliminate any existing Technical Debt, as well as provide guidance on how to prevent further accumulation. Contact us today to start tackling your Technical Debt!
