Technical Debt is similar to Financial Debt. It cost interest and payback. If it is not managed properly it may cost a lot in the future.
It goes on accumulating when the development team cuts too many corners to add new features and expedite software release delivery. It mainly happens when the developers attempt to deliver the project as quickly as possible without documenting and code review and proper testing. This often creates problems that must be fixed in the future.
Technical debt occurs in many ways, but here are six examples:
1. Poor software code quality
The most apparent technical debt is poor-quality software code. There are many reasons behind poor code quality, such as the following:
- lack of commenting
- lack of following coding standards by developers; and
- Other factors include time pressures that mount with poor scheduling or when developers must rewrite outsourced code. These examples can raise technical debt to critical levels.
2. Lack of Monitoring and IT leadership
If the codes are not reviewed and the code control procedure is weak and or IT leadership is poor it contributes to technical debt. The evolution of cloud and containerization trends moves rapidly and can quickly bypass customers’ and leadership teams’ understanding. This means that organizations often adopt unnecessary tools or make decisions that they don’t fully understand, which creates technical debt.
3. No documentation
The lack of technical documentation, like design document, process flow document etc., are often are the source of technical debt. Technical documentation is easy to ignore or shortchange, especially on projects with a tight budget. But resolving documentation-based technical debt isn’t about throwing technical writers at the problem. Organizations should train or enforce documentation in software development workflows. Managers must also hold employees accountable for the documentation related to their roles.
4. Lack of communication and knowledge sharing
A lack of collaboration is a significant cause of technical debt. Job security through obscurity is another problem that occurs when a programmer, engineer or sys admin doesn’t share job-related information with co-workers. Whether information isolation is simply the nature of a particular role or a result of individual intentions, teams might not even realize that knowledge is getting lost over time. Any IT staff with full control over a process must be responsible for maintaining documentation for it; even if the resource is not widely shared, it should exist.
5. Insufficient software testing
Testing software is another easy corner to cut that never ends well. Such technical debt is common in organizations that lack quality assurance support and have yet to implement DevOps.
Conclusion
Preparation of flow diagram and design document before starting the project will minimize the technical depts. Setting practical deadlines for the delivery of the software projects. Reviewing the source code, testing and using SCRUM helps a lot to minimize technical debts.