Tech debt is the job you’re putting off to complete a task. If you try to cut down the corners, stating “I’ll get back to this later”, you’ve incurred a tech debt and you’d better find an idea to fix it. If you do not go for a rational plan to tackle tech debt and manage properly, with time it gets unmanageable and causes costlier changes which could bring your company to a poor condition.
Assuming your present constraints, you may choose to enter into tech debt. Well, that’s fine! But, it is not advisable to carry it for a very long time. Just like any other loan, tech debt accumulates and eventually keeps biting you till you mark the loan on a repayment schedule.
Check out technical debt when you notice it
Take tech debt as a temporary compromise on the ever evolving status of your software architecture or development strategies. You’ve left some task incomplete like writing code w/o code annotation, making it tougher for the non-techs to debug. Or you have piled up a list of known defects which remain unaddressed… Or just compromised an automated test because itcosts much than manual testing!
Making use of depreciated, unsupportive and out of date techniques for efficacy or just for the sake that you’re familiar with it accrues more debt. Tech debt includes incomplete work which is functionally usable without adding any crucial risk.
How does Tech Debt Accrues?
There are limitations in every aspect of life. And the same is the case with developing software. You may have deadlines for acquiring a viable product and meeting the client’s commitments. Till the time, the developers and product management teams are aligned, you can “cut corners” to handle things quickly, once you make a conscious decision to go through that methodology. You make a commitment to pay the short term debt at a later stage and assure to go for full-fledged task completion.
Impact of technical debt
For instance, a team didn’t place the right code annotation and testing automation on the given deadline. One development commenced the module, the other should maintain it. testing should be done manually or automatically. And in between, the customers are using the application:
It leads to major three consequences:
• Slow delivery- With the growth of the business, its usage grows, the change cost multiplies exponentially. Poorly managed code cannot allow you to continue development which causes longer time requirement for development, testing as well as deployment.
• Increased risk- Once the software is used in the production stage, a single change can cause an adverse impact on your business and clients. It causes a tradeoff between customer contentment and eventual usability.
• Poor quality- With loops in test coverage and documentation as well as customer and time constraints, quality is one thing which is at risk.
Getting into debt should be a conscious decision, if you know how to manage it properly. When you eventually manage a fiscal loan, you minimize the interest payouts. Visit here to find out how to apply for debt consolidation loans.