Understanding and Addressing Technical Debt

What is Technical Debt?

Technical debt means a situation where the development team analyzes the after-effects when it accelerates the delivery of a piece of functionality or a project, which later needs to be refectories. In simple words, it is analyzing the result of favoring speedy delivery over perfect code.

The first time this term was used was by software developer Ward Cunningham. It has been mentioned in countless academic studies, debates, and panel discussions, and it is still relevant today. This programming development concept highlights the extra development work that most development teams have to face because of overlooking the comprehensive solution and focusing only on the short term.

Usually, developers prefer speed over quality, which is not a useful strategy, as they will have to fix issues in the future by restructuring the existing code (refactoring). Refactoring is also part of the development process, and it’s natural to encounter issues and fix them later. But neglecting the possible issues, which may cause problems and have the possibility to grow big, is known as technical debt, as you will have to fix them in the future.

Understanding Technical Debt with an Example

Suppose you build software that functions well on mobile but shows errors on desktop. Now, you know it and persist with this, ignoring the fact that you will have to make it run on the desktop as well. You deliver it to the client, and after a month after discovering the faulty behavior, the client asks you to fix it. In the beginning, you had two options: dedicate time to fix the error right there and avert the risk of dealing with it later or save time now and spend your time fixing issues later.

The second option, in the programming universe, is called owing a debt. However, it’s not financial debt, yet it demands full settlement in the same way as you would do to financial debt.

1. Deliberate Technical Debt: Engineers know the right way to build something and the quick way too. But sometimes the quick way seems the right way, as most times the team will intentionally do something hastily, knowing it could backfire still they do it to meet the tight deadlines. This way, they reduce the time to market and incur tech debt. While taking this route, they shouldn’t consider timesaving only. The real concern should be about how much time and effort it would take to repay the incurred debt.

2. Accidental/Outdated Design Tech Debt: While designing software systems, the team tries to downplay future needs with simple designs and quick delivery. This balance is critical as the systems evolve and requirements change, you would realize that the “simple design” is flawed, or the new functionality has become difficult and slow to implement. You won’t face any complexity while refactoring an original design compared to a simple design with a temporary focus.

3. Bit Rot Technical Debt: Such tech debt happens over time. It’s a gradual change, as a component or system slowly accrues unnecessary complexities undergoing lots of incremental changes. The situation gets even worse when several people work upon it and do not fully understand the original design.

Categorizing tech debt won’t enable you to handle it easily. However, it can help you with productive conversations while strengthening your team. Tech debt won’t go anywhere. It always exists in systems, but you need to understand how the debt is slowing your team down and make efforts to deliver features in the short term with increasing overall productivity in the mid to long term.

To effectively manage technical debt, it is crucial to measure it accurately. Various metrics and approaches help quantify the extent of technical debt in software systems.

a. Lines of Code (LOC)

One approach to measuring technical debt is by evaluating the lines of code within a software system. A higher number of lines of code can indicate increased complexity, making it harder to maintain and modify the codebase.

b. Cyclomatic Complexity

Cyclomatic complexity is a valuable metric that quantifies the number of independent paths within a program’s source code. It helps identify complex code that may be prone to bugs or harder to comprehend and maintain.

c. Code Duplication

Code duplication occurs when identical or similar code fragments exist in multiple places within a software system. Identifying and quantifying code duplication can provide insights into potential areas of technical debt.

d. Test Coverage

Test coverage measures the extent to which the code is exercised by automated tests. Inadequate test coverage can indicate potential areas of technical debt, as untested code may be prone to defects and require additional maintenance.

e. Code Smells and Static Analysis

Code smells are indicators of potential design or implementation issues within the codebase. Static analysis tools can detect code smells and provide an objective measure of the technical debt present in the software.

f. Technical Debt Index (TDI)

The Technical Debt Index (TDI) is a metric that quantifies technical debt based on multiple factors such as code complexity, duplication, and code smells. It provides a holistic measure of technical debt, allowing organizations to track and compare debt levels across different projects.

1. Debt Assessment: When identifying technical debt, you would see some key signals that might be the reason for technical debt, like:
   • Product performance ratings could be declining.
   • Developers may be taking much longer to iterate.

These key signals help you measure the number of days developers would be spending to perform activities such as refactoring or replacing the application to reduce technical debt. By attaching a dollar amount to these functions, you can compare this data to other milestones, like the number of remaining days before the release date. This whole exercise will give you an excellent cost/benefit analysis and aid in communicating more effectively with the rest of the organization. Besides providing a current status update, estimates of how you expect technical debt to change over time are also significant.

2. Debt Communication: Once you identify the technical debt, you should share it with the stakeholders even before you proceed to manage it. It’s a trait of a good IT Company. Once it’s done, it’s time to communicate to the non-IT managers about the true cost of technical debt. Also, you should tell that you’re committed to paying off the technical debt sooner than later.

3. Debt Mitigation: Using Agile practices to minimize the technical debt can work, as in Agile environments, contrary to traditional development environments, iterations of work are frequently delivered to the user instead of shipping it when it’s complemented. Agile iterations improve bugs and issues that develop in each release. It minimizes the scope of a release to ensure quality work instead of promoting a large number of functions in a release. Agile methodologies like test automation, continuous integration, and weekly sprints can help you handle technical debts.

In programming, technical debt reflects extra development work that arises when developers ship code that is easy to implement in the short term instead of applying the best overall solution. Like financial debt, technical debt gets more expensive the longer you hold it. That’s why you should always aim to pay off or minimize technical debt, as it reduces risk, improves agility, and deliver best-in-class results.

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