Technical debt, also known as code debt or design debt, is a phrase commonly used in the software development industry. It is sometimes referred to as a general term that addresses various issues, such as bugs, old code, and a lack of documentation.
But how exactly can it be explained? How can it be identified? Let’s discuss technical debt, provide examples and types, and give tips on how to reduce it.
Technical Debt
Technical debt is a term used in the software development industry to refer to the effects of emphasizing speedy delivery over excellent code. It can also refer to the negative consequences arising from the buildup of shortcuts, quick fixes, and compromises made during the development process.
It is not necessarily a bad thing to have technical debts, as it is sometimes required in order to move a project ahead. Nevertheless, if it is not well controlled, it can make the development process more difficult, lower product quality, and, in the end, cost more time and money.
What Leads to Technical Debt?
Various factors can lead to technical debts. They include the pressures of business, the practices of development, people-based variables, and context shifts.
Depending on how it is handled, it can be beneficial or damaging to the situation. The following is a list of factors that cause technical debts:
- Development practices: The use of development methods such as inadequate testing, poor documentation, and inadequate resource allocation can all contribute to the accumulation of technical debts
- Poor IT leadership: Lack of awareness of fast emerging technologies, such as the cloud and containerization, can result in the adoption of superfluous tools or judgments that are not well-informed, both of which contribute to technical debts.
- Pressures of business: Sometimes, businesses put the release of products more quickly or cut costs ahead of following the best practices for software development, which can lead to the accumulation of technical debts.
- Switching context: Outdated technology stacks and shifting plans might cause teams to take shortcuts to keep systems running, which adds to the code debt incurred.
- People-based variables: Causes that are related to people include things like a lack of experience, poor communication, dispersed teams, and shifting resources. These can all contribute to the accumulation of code debt.
How Do You Identify Technical Debt?
You can determine the extent of your project’s code debt by using a variety of metrics and approaches to track and measure the effect it has on your work. The following are some tips for identifying technical debt:
- Track the ratio of new defects to corrected faults to measure defect ratios. When newly discovered bugs begin to outnumber those that have been fixed, a growing amount of debt has accumulated, and you need to address the problem.
- Use measures like cyclomatic and cognitive complexity, the number of lines of code, inheritance depth, afferent and efferent couplings, nesting depth, and time spent writing code lines to assess code complexity and quality.
- Examine problem-solving time, especially low-priority ones. If code or infrastructure issues cause technical debt, ordinary tasks may take longer to complete.
- Keep track of the number of times a code segment or infrastructure activity needs to be changed or reworked. A high rate of production churn may be an indicator of technological debt.
- Calculate an estimate of the future cost of debt using the technical debt ratio (TDR). This ratio is calculated by contrasting the cost to remedy faults with the overall cost to develop the project.
- Cycle times longer than average imply a significant level of technical debt. Cycle time is the period between a developer’s first commit and deployment.
- Consider compiling a technical debt register, list, or document that identifies problems, details their effects, and recommends potential solutions to track technical debts properly.
- Issues should be classified according to their kind, complexity, severity, or priority, and a ticketing or tracking system should be used to manage both the issues and the software faults.
Technical Debt Examples
Some examples of technical debt include the following:
#1. Framework with Limitations Relating to Flexibility
This is one of the examples of technical debt that can happen if management establishes a short deadline to take advantage of the first-mover advantage. Then developers select a quick framework, even though it has recognized concerns with flexibility.
Refactor the application into a framework with additional flexibility to fix this debt.
#2. Poor Quality Code as a Result of Inadequate Coding Skills
This is one of the examples of technical debt that occurs because the developers have terrible coding skills, and the team is working hard to meet the deadline. This will lead to poorly written code that contains errors, which results in higher expenses and customer turnover.
Modify the code by employing a developer with more experience to fix this debt.
Other examples of technical debt include choosing an inappropriate platform for your business, like building a high-traffic e-commerce website on WordPress.
Types of Technical Debt
The types of technical debt include the following:
- Maintenance debt: This debt results from improper software maintenance, such as a lack of timely bug fixes and software updates.
- Developer efficiency debt: This debt occurs because of inefficient development methods that impede the productivity of the development team
- Stability debt: Instability in the system can affect the reliability and performance of the software. This results in a type of technical debt known as stability debt.
- Security debt: Security debt is incurred when software contains insufficient security protections or security flaws.
- Technical product debt: This is one of the types of unplanned technical debt. It refers to the financial burden that arises when there is a misalignment between the software’s technical architecture and the product’s requirements.
- Decision debt: A decision debt can form when decision-making is postponed or delayed, causing the software development process to be more complicated and uncertain.
What Are the Two Types of Technical Debt?
The two key types of technical debt are planned and inadvertent technical debts.
#1. Planned Technical Debts
This occurs when an organization consciously decides to generate technical debt, fully understanding its consequences, risks, and costs. For example, a team might skip writing unit tests to meet a tight deadline to write them after the release. Documenting these decisions is crucial to ensuring that the debt is addressed and paid down later.
Planned debt can be beneficial for meeting deadlines or shipping a product quickly, but it can also accumulate over time and negatively impact the project if not managed properly.
#2. Inadvertent Technical Debts
This type of debt is unintentional due to a lack of knowledge, poor planning, or changing requirements. It can happen when a team tries to produce the best code without the necessary knowledge or when they find a better solution after implementation.
Some common causes of inadvertent debt include lack of planning, external forces, ignorance, lack of flexibility, inadequate documentation, lack of collaboration, parallel projects, requirement changes, neglecting industry standards, and poor leadership. Inadvertent debt can lead to increased maintenance costs, reduced code quality, and difficulty implementing changes later in the project.
What Are the Four Quadrants of Technical Debt?
According to Martin Fowler, technical debt is categorized into four quadrants. The quadrants assist in determining the context and intent of code issues. Deliberate technical debt is chosen for quick delivery, whereas inadvertent debt is discovered after implementation.
The four quadrants are based on intent (deliberate or inadvertent) and context (prudent or reckless). They are:
- Prudent and deliberate: Shipping quickly and dealing with consequences later, usually when stakes are low and the benefits of quick delivery outweigh the risk.
- Reckless and deliberate: Prioritizing speedy delivery over producing the best code, even when knowing the best approach.
- Prudent and inadvertent: Desire to produce the best code but find a better solution after implementation.
- Reckless and inadvertent: Attempting to produce the best code without the necessary knowledge, often unaware of the mistakes.
How to Reduce Technical Debt
Reducing technical debts can be very beneficial for a business and its teams. It helps maintain a software development project’s efficiency, maintainability, and quality. Below are ten tips on how to reduce technical debt.
- Identify the debt: Be conscious of the expedient methods and concessions made during production. Have the engineering team proactively identify and make it visible, enabling you to create a plan to address it.
- Make a strategy: Create a plan for dealing with the most pressing aspects of technical debt. This may include refactoring code, producing documentation, or enhancing the overall quality of the code.
- Give the debt the highest priority: Determine which concerns are the most pressing and which may be done later. Then ensure that there is sufficient upfront planning and design to avoid rework later.
- Improve project structure: Use project management tools to track development statuses and keep on schedule. Also, monitor code issues, repair them fast, and use automated testing to reduce them since manual testing is inefficient.
- Prioritize collaboration: Share knowledge among the project group to improve efficiency and reduce technical debts.
- Maintain flexibility: Be prepared to pivot when change requires it. Also, document adequately, as proper documentation helps prevent technical debt that needs to be addressed later.
- Foster strong leadership: Ensure clear ownership, effective leadership, and well-communicated decisions to minimize technical debt.
- Manage parallel projects carefully: Be aware of the extra work you’ll need to merge changes when running parallel development.
- Follow industry standards: Adhere to established standards to avoid incurring technical debts and regularly refactor source code to improve its maintainability, readability, and efficiency.
- Establish code best practices: Create a coding standards document with best practices for developers to follow. Pair programming can also help produce better results.
Technical Debt vs Maintenance
Technical debt vs maintenance: these two concepts often overlap in software development.
Maintenance is the ongoing time and effort needed to improve code’s readability, reusability, and reliability, frequently through refactoring. It is an ongoing project with the goal of raising the codebase’s general quality and viability.
Additionally, maintenance can assist in avoiding the buildup of technical debt, which can result in software rot.
Technical debts refer to temporary shortcuts taken during implementation to speed up development. Time restraints, shifting needs, existing technical debt, duplicate code, sophisticated code, and a lack of information sharing can all contribute to it.
Decreased team velocity, unstable production environments, a longer mean time to recovery (MTTR), higher change failure rates, complex testing, duplicate code, and unstable production environments are all indicators of technical debt.
What Is Another Name for Technical Debt?
Other names for technical debt are code debt, tech debt, or design debt. They refer to the expense of rework that accumulates due to code that is not clean, well-designed, or well-tested. It occurs when development teams cut corners or make less-than-ideal decisions to accomplish short-term objectives, such as fulfilling deadlines or lowering expenses.
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