Tips to Manage Technical Debt in Software Developments

Table of Content

Technical debt is defined as the intentional delay of bug fixes to focus on new feature development in the project. This is done just to hit the launch dates of incremental software while ignoring project’s iterative development.

To understand it simply, let us say a team of developers is working on a software project. A meticulous QA team tests it for perfection and reports a list of bugs to the development team. Now instead of resolving them, developers move for further implementation in the project. This results in technical debt and eventually causes extra expenses for the client in the future. Moreover, when things get messy, developers will also find it difficult to make modifications in the cluttered code.

In this blog, we will shed light on essential tips to manage Technical Debt in software development.

Debt communication

“Assessing debt ;When it comes to determining technical debt, there are a few main indicators to look for. For example, your product's success scores may be declining, or your developers' iteration times may be significantly longer. So how do you quantify it? How much does technological debt really cost? One way to calculate this is to look at how many days developers will like to spend minimizing technological debt by refactoring or replacing the program. You should also equate this data to other benchmarks, such as the number of days before the release date, once you've assigned a dollar value to certain features. This will give you a great cost-benefit perspective to help you communicate with the rest of the company more efficiently. It's useful to produce forecasts of how technological debt could evolve over time in addition to offering a current status update.

Debt communication Recognize that technical debt occurs in the first place and discuss this discovery with core stakeholders is one of the most crucial phases in handling technical debt. It should be the duty of IT management to set the tone and convey the true cost of technical debt to non-IT managers. The IT director must also emphasize the importance of paying down technological debt as quickly as possible.”

- Nabil Mounem, Founder & Marketer of ; Have Websites

Must have a plan from the beginning

“Minimizing technical debt involves having a plan from the beginning about how to combat it. I look at it in the same vein as managing scope creep. They're different problems, but if you set clear guidelines from the beginning, you're more likely to avoid them both. In the case of technical debt, you need to make it clear to your team that speed is not the only consideration, as that's what normally causes people to cut corners with code and other tech implementation.

Ideally, you'll want to have someone monitoring the project for tech debt. This will likely be a person in a management role, and they'll be tasked with testing the product or service and ensuring it runs as effectively and efficiently as it can. They should pick it apart, look at all the moving pieces, and develop a course correction plan if it looks like the team has gotten off track.”
- Rex Freiberger, CEO, ;Gadget Review

Must reorganize software development strategy

“If you want to manage technical debt in software development, you must reorganize your software development strategy. Such an issue appeared due to the massive disruption of design and missing technical points.
Another - we can have integrated metrics into your leading strategy to recover from significant technical debt. You must not forget about unit tests, and it is also a simplistic way to manage debt by writing and conducting unit tests frequently. You may also refactor your code, which will also benefit you to deal with existing technical debt.
Make sure to ennoble the internal quality of a product's source code sans changing its external behavior.”
- Caroline Lee, Marketing Director of ; CocoSign

Communication and honesty

“Communication and honesty are key for managing technical debt. Without regular and honest communication, developers will often end up leaving code unworked on or taking shortcuts in order to hit deadlines. The pace and nature of software development requires that managers and developers constantly touch base on the agreed-upon metrics for tracking the status of a project.”
- Daivat Dholakia, ; Force By Mojio

Treat it like any other product requirement

Technical debt accumulates in several different ways. For example, early on in a product life cycle, developers favor quick-to-implement designs over more robust yet lengthier to develop architecture. Those design decisions need reevaluation later and often lead to refactors as the product matures. Additional requirements such as scalability and robust run-time behavior are becoming a priority. Technology debt also accrues by delaying to upgrade the codebase to changes in the underlying tech stack such as compilers, libraries, and operating systems, to name a few. Development teams face the dilemma that, on the one hand, focus on technical debt does not immediately result in marketable features and capabilities.

On the other hand, ignoring technical debt for too long might lead to significantly deprecated products that lose their marketability. The best way to deal with managing technical debt is to treat it like any other product requirement. The development team needs to establish a process to identify technical debt in a detailed as possible manner as it accrues. Teams typically maintain databases to track feature requests and development tasks, and they should track technical debt in the same way. As the group plans their development cycles, they should regularly review work related to technical debt, prioritize based on their best assessment on market impact, and then schedule the work.
- Andreas Scherer, CEO of Golden Helix

Conclusion

Putting off bug fixtures intentionally with a focus on new feature development in the project is defined as Technical debt. This usually occurs when individuals are more concerned with the project's rapid launch than with the quality of the product. In this blog, we have learned some significant tips for managing technical debt in software development. This will help you comprehend complexities and solutions for avoiding additional costs.