Technology is always in flux, and enterprises keep adding new digital offerings to remain competitive. But side-by-side, most enterprises also work under extreme time pressure. They also remain overloaded with day-to-day routine and operational problems to do justice to these upgrades. Technical debt is the implied cost of work put aside or not fixing problems on time. Many companies delay or omit some work to focus on the immediate problems. They have to pay the price for such omissions later, and such price manifests as technical debt. 

Just as financial debt accrues interest over time, technical debt accrues “interest” in the form of reduced software quality and decreased productivity. 

It accumulates as a software project progresses. The longer it goes unaddressed, the more it impedes development speed. Side-by-side bugs and the risk of system failures increase. Also, it becomes more costly and time-consuming to make amends. 

It occurs from a “build now, fix later” mentality. It sets in when taking shortcuts or trying to cut corners when developing software. Often, developers rush projects to meet tight deadlines in a competitive marketplace. 

Not all technical debt is bad, though. Technical debt allows developers to add new features fast. They do not have to remain bogged down in an endless loop of fine-tuning the code. 

Developer Ward Cunningham, an author of the Agile Manifesto, first coined the term “technical debt.” He states, “A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back with a rewrite. The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt.”

The types of technical debt

It is common in software development. It manifests in various forms, such as:

• Poor and unoptimised code. Such code is difficult to maintain. The IT team will have to waste extra time to maintain or upgrade such code. 
• Design flaws or limitations in the software architecture. Design flaws are often hard or impossible to rectify, and the enterprise may have to invest in rewriting the code.
• Inadequate or incomplete documentation. Developers cannot understand how the software works. They spend time seeking information before fixing bugs or otherwise maintaining the code.
• Insufficient or incomplete testing. Undiscovered bugs cause errors, sub-optimal performance, customer dissatisfaction, and loss of revenue. 
• Dependency debt, or relying on outdated or vulnerable third-party libraries or components. When dependencies become obsolete, the software ceases to function well. Costly code rework becomes inevitable. 
• Infrastructure debt. Neglecting the maintenance of underlying infrastructure, such as servers, degrades performance. Again, the enterprise must duplicate time and effort to re-provision the infrastructure.

When technical debts grow, IT teams spend more and more time maintaining the software, putting out fires and making quick fixes. This, in turn, leads to a downward spiral where making short-term fixes to taper long standing issues worsens the core problems. The development team becomes distracted with maintenance and cannot focus on development. 

How to identify technical debt

Many enterprises do not realise they have it in the first place. They continue with their inefficient ways and lose out to the competition.

The best way to identify technical debt is by looking for its impact on the business. Here is how to identify technical debt.

• Look for tell-tale signs from the development team. It could indicate technical debt if they find it hard to onboard new members or encounter lengthy delays in getting work done. 
• Look for code smells. A code smell is any code characteristic that may lead to issues and cause more than normal code maintenance. Common examples of code smells include complex code, duplicated code, long methods, and long functions. Such code also has excessive use of comments.
• Track metrics such as number of bugs, time taken to fix those bugs, time taken to add new features and so on. As a rule of thumb, the higher these metrics, the higher the technical debt the project has accumulated.
• Track the value lead time. This is the time to develop, deploy, and roll out user benefits. An increase in value lead time indicates technical debt impeding effective workflows. The underlying reasons could be poor code quality, friction in the development process, or frequent errors.
• Consider the user experience. Technical debt often results in patchy user experiences. If users make frequent complaints or give up on the product altogether, the reason may be technical debt. 
• Check for deteriorated infrastructure. Common technical debt symptoms include increased expenditure on run-time infrastructure and increased downtime. When technical debt persists, systems do not respond well to traffic spikes and deliver a poor customer experience. The cost to keep systems running increases.
• Consider user feedback. If users complain of slow load times or crashes, it may indicate underlying technical debt issues.

How to tackle technical debt

Addressing it involves a trade-off of sacrificing speed or time-to-market for quality. Enterprises find it tempting to add new features quickly. But if it accumulates, the system becomes slow, bug-ridden, and error-prone. 

The development teams need to consider the following to manage it and strike the right trade-off.

1. Think the design over. 

Spending extra time to define a secure and scalable architecture leads to fewer headaches down the lane. Before finalising the design and architecture:

• Review the latest technology and architectural advances. 
• Evaluate the pros and cons of the chosen architecture. 
• Make sure the selected architecture will support feature expansions and integration requirements.

2. Adopt coding best practices.

Adopt coding best practices to simplify code.

• Develop clear-cut policy coding standards for the development team. Code without proper standards makes later updates difficult. Everyone being on the same page vis-à-vis standards reduces technical debt.
• Adopt a modular coding approach, which offers flexibility and makes integration and changes easy later.
• Refactor code periodically. Refactoring involves restructuring existing code to improve consistency without changing its external behaviour. Refactoring improves code performance and readability.
• Improve documentation. Proper documentation renders clarity to the codebase. It becomes easier for developers to debug and maintain the code. Clearcut documentation also eases onboarding new developers and reduces the risk of new technical debt.
• Update code dependencies to reduce complexity.

3. Invest in test automation. 

Automated testing decreases debug cycles, and highlights code challenges immediately. Testing scripts check conformance on every code update and reduce defects. 

Also, adopt continuous integration and delivery. The CI/CD approach ensures continuous testing and integration of new code. It reduces the risk of integration issues and technical debt accumulation.

4. Stamp out the root causes. 

The best approach is to pre-empt technical debt by identifying and fixing the underlying causes rather than trying to fix it after it occurs.

• Have clarity on requirements upfront. When teams indulge in scope creep by altering requirements midway, it forces code reworks. The architecture or design may not sync with the changed requirements, forcing technical debt. 
• Offer developer training. Lack of developer training and unawareness of coding protocols leads to poor code and technical debt.
• Implement hardware well. Improper hardware installation makes maintenance 
• difficult. Ignoring hardware configuration also leads to costly performance and security issues.

Partnering with an established vendor rather than developing the project in-house reduces technical debt. A partnership reduces development time and offloads ongoing maintenance and support. An experienced partner delivers speedy implementation without risks.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to getting out of it, though. The best and even the most effective approach depends on the unique circumstances surrounding a company. The enterprise culture and the management strategy have a big say in the technical debt tolerated and fixed. An enterprise culture of risk-taking, for instance, will make developers more willing to accumulate it to provide users with new features quickly. On the other hand, a conservative company may take the slow-but-steady route and put the software into extensive testing to ensure the release of robust software that does not accumulate technical debt.