What is Technical Debt? A 101 Guide on Tech Debt For Developers and Managers

If you’ve worked in software development for any length of time, you’ve likely heard the term technical debt. Technical debt is a phrase originally coined by software developers to highlight the long-term impact of short-term technical decisions on an organisation’s architecture.

While technical debt may sound similar to financial debt, if you accrue technical debt it can lead to major headaches down the road for your IT department, software project, or product team. In this article, we’ll dive into what technical debt is, why it matters, and how to identify and manage it effectively.

What Exactly is Technical Debt? + Definition of Technical Debt 

Before we get into the detail, let’s start with a definition to understand what exactly is technical debt: 

Technical debt is the cost of speeding up your software development process, with bugs, fixes, and workaround solutions adding up to create operational IT issues over time. Put simply, it’s the debt the organisation builds when choosing an easy solution in the short term rather than building a comprehensive solution for the long term. 

Just like financial debt, as you add more technical debt to your architecture, the impact compounds over time, leaving you at risk of a complete failure in your IT network or critical applications. 

But no organisation is without debt. Debt occurs naturally as technology advances, with legacy code, unsupported systems, and new features meaning organisations are always carrying a certain level of debt. The trick though is to manage technical debt effectively to stay ahead of future catastrophes.  
 
Also read: 

• Clean Architecture   
• Legacy system modernization  

What is The Risk of Tech Debt, And Why is it Important? 

If your level of technical debt gets too high, it’ll start to have a negative impact on your business. It’ll also impact future projects, reducing their long-term viability, scalability, and maintainability. 

To bring this to life, here are some of the key risks and negatives of too much technical debt. 

1. Decreased software quality: Quick fixes and workarounds tend to create bugs, vulnerabilities, and poor-quality code that degrades over time. This will reduce the speed of your software and cause slow down.
2. Reduced development speed: Trying to build on an unsteady foundation makes everyone’s job harder. Unmaintained, tangled code slows down future feature development and makes changes riskier, reducing the effectiveness of your agile development and scrum teams.
3. Increased costs: If you continue to take on technical debt, eventually, you’ll be forced into rewrites or be required to invest in creating a whole new code-base from scratch. Both of these options are expensive, incurring extra cost and taking the time of valuable resources.
4. Competitive disadvantage: If your software products begin slowing down, not only will they fail to meet business needs, but they’ll put you at a disadvantage in the market. If this continues for a period of time, it won’t be long until the company’s bottom line suffers!
5. Developer frustration: As a software developer, you want to be working on innovative and exciting projects. If instead teams must spend their time unpicking technical debt, there’s a chance they’ll get demoralized and may look for a new job elsewhere.

Over time, technical debt acts becomes a heavier and heavier ball around the ankle of your organization, slowing everything down and making it harder to more forward.

The Types of Technical Debt – 5 Technical Debt Examples 

Technical debt isn’t just related to your software code. In reality, there’s actually several areas where the cost of technical debt can build up, especially in fast moving agile teams. 

Here are five common examples of different types of technical debt from areas you may not expect. 

1. Code debt: Perhaps the most well-known type of technical debt, code debt, comes from software development teams taking shortcuts during their coding sprints. Whether it’s writing messy code, skipping refactoring, or copying/pasting dodgy code snippets, this poor quality accumulates over time into a bug-ridden mess.
2. Documentation debt: If your team don’t tidy up behind themselves, it’ll lead to documentation and design debt. If code comments, specification documents, change logs, or architectural diagrams are incomplete, teams won’t know how things work, which risks creating further unintentional technical debt in the future.
3. Testing debt: If software engineering teams fail to properly unit test, regression test, or integration test their code, there’s a chance it will fall over in the future. Poor testing is one of the leading causes of technical debt, as testing phases get skipped when timelines are tight.
4. People debt: Technical debt is often considered to be a technology-only problem, when in fact debt also comes from your development team. Lack of training, outdated skills, and inexperience in certain technologies all create debt in your team over time.
5. Technology debt: Infrastructure debt and debt arising from a chosen technology is another, more strategic source of technical debt. Using outdated frameworks, legacy tech stacks, and unsupported coding languages leads to environments falling behind and opening themselves up to security risks.

What Causes Technical Debt?

While it’s easy to see that technical debt is bad, no one sets out to create intentional debt. There are many factors that lead to development teams incurring debt, these include:

• Prioritizing speed and tight deadlines
• A lack of defined processes and standards within the development team
• Unrealistic expectations from stakeholders
• Limited budgets forcing teams into poor technology decisions
• Lack of resourcing to provide adequate time to properly design or document solutions
• Poor testing or pressure to approve code by senior team members
• Not allowing time for identifying, analyzing, and fixing existing technical debt

Basically, any time short-term goal that is prioritized over the long-term greater good is likely to create some form of technical debt.

3 Ways to Measure Technical Debt In Your Company 

Now that we know why technical debt occurs, it’s time to start detecting it within your own IT environment. Here are three metrics you can monitor to detect whether technical debt is building up. 

1. Code quality reviews: Tracking the quality of your code is the primary way to understand how much technical debt may be entering your environment. Code coverage stats, static code analysis, code complexity/maintainability scores, and linting errors are all indicators of environmental tech debt that could go on to cause operational problems.
2. Bug/issue tracking: Tracking your levels of bugs and software issues is a great indicator of technical debt. Poor quality is a direct contributor to software problems, so a rapidly growing bug backlog may indicate broader problems that are contributing to technical debt.
3. Velocity metrics: Technical debt slows down development teams. If your project management tools are showing that your team’s productivity is dropping, a tech debt-riden environment could be an underlying factor.

Combining quantitative metrics like the above with direct feedback from developers is a great way to paint the picture of your technical debt to senior management. 

A Quick Guide to Help You Reduce Technical Debt 

Once you’ve identified the amount of technical debt you hold, you need to plan for some intentional technical debt reduction. Reducing debt load doesn’t happen on its own, so you need to take proactive and deliberate steps to bring it back under control.  

Here’s a quick 4-step guide to help you on your technical debt reduction journey: 

• To begin, it’s all starts by making the reduction of technical debt a priority. If you don’t, it will always drop to the bottom of the list, leaving the problem to simply get worse over time. To do this, you need to get buy-in from senior stakeholders, accepting that parts of your development spring, resource plans, and product roadmaps will have to be sacrificed.

• Next, you must decide on a technical debt strategy. Paying off technical debt can be done in several ways, but the two most common are re-factoring and big bang. Re-factoring requires you to review and update your codebase bit-by-bit, aiming to minimise disruption while slowly bringing down bad debt. A big bang approach is more a more fundamental way of addressing technical debt, essentially starting again by re-developing in parallel. Each has their pros and cons in terms of time, cost, and effectiveness and will likely be determined by the scale of your current debt, the commitment to reducing it, and the resources you have available.

• Once you’ve established a strategy, next you must determine your cost and resourcing model. The key question here is whether you want to take the technical debt project forward in-house or use an outsourced partner. Dedicated in-house resources have the existing knowledge of your codebase, but may quickly get burnt out trying to undo years of unintentional debt. On the other hand, while an outsourced partner may take a little longer to get up to speed, they bring a different perspective, benefiting from best practice and a fresh pair of eyes.

• No matter the approach you choose, you need to agree on the standards, processes, and tools you’ll use to reduce technical debt over time. This includes an automated testing scripts, code review standards, and style guides that will establish how your improved code will look. As we’re seeing in all areas of IT, AI-tools are flooding the market to help you automatically identify and update technically compromised code, helping turbocharge your technical debt recovery.

Technical Debt Happens – Let Us Help You Manage Technical Debt 

Technical debt is the result of making short-term tactical decisions that impact the long-term stability of your IT environment. It’s an inevitable part of software development, but left unchecked, it can cause havoc on your IT environment. 

At Inetum, we’re experts at guiding organizations across the globe to re-imagine their IT capabilities, helping them reduce risk, improve efficiency, and drive operational excellence. If you’d like to hear more about Technical Debt, how to spot it, and how to begin paying off debt, join us for an in-depth webinar on the 5th June, at 11:30 CEST.  

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