In today’s fast paced and rapid software product development and app development practices, technical debt has become a part and parcel of development for many programmers.
Like a financial debt, accumulation of technical debt too can worsen if left unchecked. But what is technical debt? Is it always a bad thing? And can it even be avoided at all?
Today we will explore what is technical debt and why it happens.
What is Technical debt?
Technical debt arises when a development team opts for a quick but compromised solution to a problem, compared to a more comprehensive one. This later results in extensive reworking and code refactoring, and also costs in terms of time and resources.
Technical debt is also often known as “design debt”, “code debt”, or “tech debt”.
Some usual day-to-day practices which can often result in technical debt are shortcuts in the code, temporary workarounds, low-quality code, and other short-term solutions. Such activities do work temporarily but ultimately cause long-term pain.
Why and how does technical debt happen?
Technical debt can happen when developers choose to implement a short-term fix or may unknowingly build a compromised solution due to lack of complete information.
- Design lag: This is when the development of the app or product begins way before any wireframe or design has been documented. This usually a result of deliberate decision making to fast track a MVP or product demo.
- Similarly startups can feel the pressing need to get to market faster than planned. In such cases often customer pleasing features are added without complete user journey consideration or technical impact on the code. Usually this is a considered decision by stakeholders to retain competitive edge in market.
- Knowledge gap due to lack of domain expertise, lack of functional understanding, or due to improper due diligence can sometimes lead a business to make decisions which may result in mistakes. Later corrective actions might be required costing resources and more importantly time.
- Bad code Or, perhaps, a developer lacks the knowledge to write graceful code causing unforeseen complications later. Or further still, outsourced work is found to be substandard and requires reworking further down the line. All of these are characterized as inadvertent types of debt.
- When working with remote teams there may be collaboration deficit, wherein the scope details of feature details may not be shared correctly across all team members. Such collaboration or communication gap gives raise to technical debt.
- For critical aspects of software product development such as UI/UX, using framework, when building APIs or setting up infrastructure it is important to follow industry standards and practices. Circumventing the set standards and not integrating them in design or technologies until later can incur debt. Rarely does this occur due to knowledge gap and is more likely to be a conscious decision.
- Features changes or last-minute specification changes to keep up with competitors are mostly decisions taken in haste. Also such decision tend to follow with poorly documented requirement. Failure to address this in time may lead to piling up of tech debt.
- Some other ways to incur code debt can be product development team might lack the flexibility to change paths , they may reprioritize tasks as and when business needs evolve; lack of comprehensive testing giving rise to hasty bug fixes that then need later attention; lack of foresight on work being carried out on parallel aspects of the product.
Can technical debt be avoided?
Technical debt cannot be always avoided. It is acceptable if it lets allows you get to market faster than a competitor. But it does eventually need to be taken care of, and that process can be resource and time intensive. Avoiding as much code debt as possible is a lot easier in the longer run.
It can be avoided by creating awareness with your development team, allowing them to pinpoint to and talk about code debt at early stages.
Make time in the development time for code reviews and technical debt, so that it can be tackled before it rolls on to become a major issue. Allow developers to take corrective steps provide ample time so that they do not need to cut corners.
The ideal way to avoid any debt can be to involve the developers in all stages of planning and development. Make detailed documentation for business requirements, maintain technical documentation for knowledge transfer.
Conclusion:
Any product development team needs to take cognizance of technical debt and tackle it head on.
In the next part we will take a look at different types of technical debts and some tips on how one can go about identifying and reducing the technical debt.