What Is Tech Debt with Three (3) Causes
What is Tech Debt in simple terms? Tech Debt is also known as code debt or technical debt, meaning any code that decreases agility as the project matures.
It comes as a result of the development teams taking action to fasten the delivery of a piece feature or a project that needs refactoring later. Summarily, technical debt results from prioritizing speedy delivery over perfect code.
Since you know what Tech Debt in the UK is, you should know that those in the technology space refer to it as a catchall that covers everything from bugs to legacy code to missing documentation. But what is the cause of tech debt?
It includes:
Cause #1: Unclear Timeline
A technical debt on agile can occur when the performance and quality of a product are sacrificed to get to market quicker. Sometimes development teams even release applications that aren’t full-featured or don’t have critical capabilities due to pressure to deliver on a faster timeline.
Cause #2: Constant change
Constant change is another cause of technical debt, meaning your full-featured applications with timely creation may arrive in the marketplace already out of date. It’s due to the increase in new market opportunities, new cyber threats, and developer turnover.
Cause #3: Ignoring new technology
Using outdated technology is part of the causes of technical debt, meaning the technology used for your product can become obsolete or not supported each year. Before developing modern applications, you’ll need several coding languages, developer frameworks, and libraries. All of which are constantly advancing and prone to trends.
What are tech debt examples?
What is tech debt? It’s the consequences of software development actions that intentionally or unintentionally prioritize client value.
The following are examples of technical debt that organizations are striving to manage.
- Poor software code quality means developers are anxious to use the latest tools despite the project having no business case software.
- Bad IT leadership, meaning organizations often adopt unnecessary tools or make decisions that they don’t fully understand due to the advancement of cloud and containerization trends
- Insufficient software testing becomes a technical debt when organizations lack quality assurance support and have yet to implement DevOps. It’ll leave them with automated testing options.
- Lack of technical documentation brings about technical debt, meaning organizations should bring documentation into their DevOps culture and automate documentation in development workflows.
Read Also: Why Are Tech Companies Laying Off: How Best to Avoid One
How to prevent tech debt?
What is tech debt and the way out? Managing technical debt means accumulating work that increases when developers implement faster, short-term solutions instead of more optimal (but more labor-intensive) solutions.
For instance, project managers can avoid taking on unnecessary debt and negotiate existing debt without delaying innovations. There are some tips to use which include:
- It would be best if you made technical debt a recurring topic of conversation during planning meetings. It’ll help keep the focus on long-term improvement, flexibility, and scalability.
- You can reduce technical debt in Agile by dedicating time to illustrate what happens if you don’t address your technical debt to your team. It would help if you also clamored for the importance of bringing out development time for debt-related projects.
- Another way to manage technical debt is to have KPIs around product performance or development velocity. For instance, include a requirement that focuses on feature-related work.
- Ensure that your development team tracks technical debt where they follow other development items. It’ll help to prevent a particular item from falling through the cracks and remaining undiscovered until something breaks.
