Technical debt: How to pay it off?

Your software's technical debt will compound and cause problems. It will have an effect not only on the consumer experience but also on your team and company.

When not properly managed, technical debt can increase development costs. It can lead to the loss of customers and vulnerability to cyberattacks. Learn how to begin reducing technical debt immediately to safeguard your product’s future.

I. Technical debt meaning

Technical debt is the cost of reworking a solution that results from selecting a simple but limited solution. 

Complex technical debt hinders a company’s ability to compete and innovate, which is the most significant effect. It drains your resources, time, energy, and capacity to innovate, adapt, and develop.

And it is one of those things that is difficult to identify, manage, and avoid.

II. What causes technical debt?

When developing a solution, you can anticipate a great deal and devote much of your time to project planning and code polishing. But there are always a few variables beyond your control, which can contribute to technical debt:

1. Time pressure

As a result of the strain to deliver on an accelerated schedule, dedicated development teams frequently release applications that are incomplete or lack essential features. To accelerate time to market, development teams may compromise performance and quality.

2. Constant change

Even on-time, fully-functional applications may appear on the market already obsolete. IT executives face persistent challenges due to rising customer expectations, the emergence of new market opportunities, the emergence of new cyber threats, and developer turnover.

3. Outdated technology

Modern application development typically requires multiple programming languages, developer frameworks, and libraries, which can become obsolete or unsupported annually. Python could become Visual Basic tomorrow.

III. Technical debt examples

The Year 2000 problem is a classic example of technical debt. In the 1960s and 1970s, many software developers chose to save memory by encoding dates as two digits: “73” instead of “1973.” The practice persisted for years, despite the decline in memory prices. Many of these programs became ingrained in the operational business and remained in use far longer than anyone had anticipated.

As the year 2000 approached, thousands of businesses and government agencies realized that date calculations would fail on a massive scale and, as a result, engaged in a frantic cleanup effort. The estimated cost of resolving the Y2K problem was $100 billion.

Nevertheless, technical debt is not exclusive to software. A best cybersecurity practice, for instance, is to grant file permissions to organizational functions rather than to individuals. Suppose an administrative assistant receives permission from his supervisor to view sensitive documents that he normally would not be able to see. 

If the software development company grants the exception and fails to revoke it later, it has granted permanent access to sensitive documents to an account that could become compromised and become a security risk.

IV. Impacts of technical debt 

1. It decreases the team's efficiency.

The effect of technical debt is not linear, but exponential. It has a significant impact on the ability of teams to innovate and execute new ideas, as they become preoccupied with eliminating technical debt rather than delivering value. They spend hours, if not days, wrangling the quick-and-dirty code to get the product to a point where future modifications won't be difficult or cause the system to collapse. This ultimately results in decreased productivity and an increase in "time to market."

2. It hurts the consumer experience.

Technical debt contributes a negative value to the organization in the form of system downtimes, poor user interface, decreased system performance, etc., all of which have a significant negative impact on customer satisfaction.

3. It impacts the organization's transparency.

If not properly grasped, Technical Debt can hurt the quality and progress of product development. It is similar to a concealed cost that can reduce efficiency, thereby affecting predictability. It also makes it difficult for the development team and product manager to anticipate the amount of time and effort required to create new features, release plans, and product roadmaps. Due to the defective nature of the estimates, this ultimately reduces transparency.

4. It diminishes developers' morale.

Technical debt affects the entire organization, particularly the developers. 52% of engineers, according to The "State of Technical Debt 2021" report, believe that technical debt negatively impacts the morale of their team. 

Because an increase in technical debt results in an increase in defects, decreased performance, system downtimes, sluggish delivery, unpredictability in estimations, and less time to work on new innovative projects, there is less time to devote to such endeavors. This sometimes results in unwarranted management pressure and calls the developers' productivity and skill set into question. Consequently, it can demotivate workers.

V. How to reduce technical debt

1. Setting coding standards

Implement procedures and timetables to prevent the accumulation of technical debt. Similar to financial debt, you must schedule pay-off periods to reduce the debt, which means setting aside specific days or hours for the team to complete the cleanup. Instead of attempting to pay off the entire debt at once, it is common practice to do it piece by piece.

2. Code review practices

Testing and code evaluations are a further method for reducing technical debt. A culture of code evaluation is as essential to the software development process as testing. No matter how extensive or rigorous your testing is, a fresh perspective from a third party can help you identify typos, bugs, edge cases, etc. that were overlooked.

3. Automated tests

Automated tests are an essential component. 99% of engineers concur that this is the most effective method for preventing defects. Automated testing is essentially a collection of individual tests - as automated programs - to double-check the code and validate the system as a whole.

In this context, one of the universal norms is to make legacy code understandable, because legacy code is inevitable. When new developers access well-organized, clean, and understandable code months or years later, they will not be confused. As “to-do” is a type of inside joke among programmers and different developers have different coding styles, a source control system that provides a history of changes and explanations could be a useful artifact.

In some instances, it is not necessary to repay technical debt. Debt associated with prototypes, experimental projects, systems nearing retirement, or migration from a legacy system to a new system is simply not worth the effort.

4. Refactoring

It is common to add a few lines of code here and there to fix a bug or introduce a new unplanned feature. It then accumulates, your codebase becomes disorderly, and you will eventually have to restructure the code to restore order.

This is known as refactoring, and you've likely encountered it frequently about technical debt. Once a project has been conceived and implemented, refactoring is the only method for reducing technical debt. As in any substantial code, there is always a location and a reason for refactoring; the key is to do it in the appropriate places.

Frequently, both project managers and developers are hesitant to engage in code refactoring because, in their words, it does not resolve bugs, is too risky and time-consuming, or the existing code is functional. Therefore, before carrying it out, you should ensure that everyone is "on the same page" When everyone recognizes the value of refactoring and the technical debt, there is a possibility for a successful outcome.

A few suggestions:

• Accept routine minor refactoring to implement design pattern best practices.
• Refactoring may consist of renaming classes/methods/variables or reorganizing them when a program's code is simple to read (its names convey its purpose).
• Encourage engineers with "better way" suggestions.
• Do not do it prematurely; not all refactoring must be completed before the publication of version 1.0.
• Branching the codebase, as a form of refactoring, may be useful in some situations; consider allocating developers time for it.

VI. Sum up

When launching a software product, it is not always possible to avoid incurring debt. Agile teams are aware of the impact that technical debt can have on software updates, from difficult decisions to coding errors. 

Maintaining and monitoring incremental payments is the key to paying off debt. Even though the method of debt repayment varies depending on the situation, team transparency and communication can help you pay off your debt quicker. This is because increased clarity on Agile initiatives can enforce a group solution to the issue at hand.