It’s time to tackle that outstanding balance of technical debt. Here are five tips to get you started.
Now that we’ve defined technical debt, the importance of calculating your technical debt score, and how much it can truly cost enterprises, it’s time to consider ways stakeholders can collaborate to reduce the tech debt burden on your organization.
It can be helpful to think about technical debt management in the same way you approach financial debt. The best course of action is not necessarily to rework your entire codebase to get rid of technical debt in giant chunks or one huge “payment”—even if you have the means to do so. Then again, you may want to move quickly on managing technical debt that charges “high interest”—that is, tech that uses up significant resources on an ongoing basis, just so you can “keep the lights on.”
The following steps enable your organization to create a plan for, and then start tackling, technical debt today.
1. Keep track of your technical debt
To manage technical debt, you first need to take stock of your current balance and ensure that you aren’t setting yourself up to let it spiral out of control in the future. However, it’s not helpful to think of technical debt as a huge mountain of refactoring that you’ll have to chip away at year after year, with little to show for your efforts. Instead, break your debt down so you can get a clear picture of its individual components.
Begin by creating a comprehensive technical debt assessment to understand its current impact on your organization.
- Organize. Break down the debt into manageable components, and then categorize those components based on urgency and importance.
- Measure. Establish clear metrics to measure and monitor technical debt regularly, which can prevent it from spinning out of control.
- Collaborate. Emphasize collaboration across members, share insights, and collectively manage technical debt together.
By visualizing technical debt as smaller, more manageable tasks, you can build a roadmap for systematic, iterative improvement based on best practices. This will in turn, foster a more sustainable approach to both technical debt management and software development generally.
2. Quantify your debt and create urgency with a technical debt score
Once you’ve captured and prioritized your organization’s technical debt, it’s time to quantify it. This step can take a variety of forms. For example, you could assign your organization a technical debt “credit score,” which provides a succinct way to communicate your debt across the organization and track how well you’re paying it down. To calculate your technical debt credit score, you can use factors such as the total number of backlogged items or the ratio of technical debt that you have eliminated vs. technical debt you are still accruing.
In 2022, McKinsey and Company introduced the Tech Debt Score (TDS), an innovative metric providing organizations with a quick means to quantify their debt and benchmark it against peers. A Technical Debt Score enables companies to “rapidly understand the scale of their problem, identify what a feasible target state could be, and determine the corresponding economic benefit from an improved TDS,” McKinsey analysts write.
McKinsey’s analysis of tech debt at 220 companies across five geographies and seven sectors found significant connections between Technical Debt Score and business performance. A high TDS is associated with higher revenue growth, while poor TDS performance leads to a downward spiral of failed efforts to modernize IT, resulting in an ever-growing burden of tech debt.
3. Triage your technical debt
Not all instances of technical debt entail the same level of risk or cost. Just as you’d prioritize and address different financial debts according to interest rates or due dates, organizations should prioritize different forms of technical debt in ways that are most relevant to their specific situation.
- Assess and categorize. Begin by assessing the impact of each debt component on your overall organization. Categorize issues based on severity, focusing on critical aspects that negatively affect functionality or impede innovation and business agility.
- Prioritize and collaborate. Prioritize tasks according to the potential risks and benefits of addressing specific components of your technical debt. Establish clear standards for prioritization, such as customer impact, code complexity, and strategic alignment. To do so, work with cross-functional teams to gather diverse insights.
- Visualize and review. Use tools like project management software to create a visual representation of the technical debt backlog. This facilitates more transparent communication and decision-making, which is critical to managing technical debt. Be sure to reassess priorities regularly and adapt them to evolving project goals and emerging challenges.
By implementing a systematic triage process, organizations can strategically allocate resources, mitigate high-impact issues, and foster a sustainable approach to managing technical debt.
4. Define “done”
Enterprises may inadvertently accumulate technical debt, not because of a deliberate choice for suboptimal code but because projects often are forgotten or go unfinished due to the pressure of turning around projects quickly. The pressure to deliver Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) makes it difficult to know when a project is genuinely complete.
Establishing a clear and comprehensive definition of “done” becomes essential in addressing this issue. Such a definition should include a systematic checklist of various activities and processes required for a development project to be considered fully complete.
For example, you can include criteria such as a set number of tests, thorough documentation, and code reviews, rather than considering it done at the conclusion of a sprint cycle. By building in these steps, you can enhance project completion standards. This proactive approach helps prevent projects from turning into technical debt over time. A well-defined “done” not only encourages better project management but also ensures that software meets high-quality standards. And of course, it will lessen the effort you spend on technical debt management that results from incomplete or hastily finished work.
5. Tackle technical debt by eliminating net-new code
If your enterprise has accrued an overwhelming amount of technical debt, it is probably time to consider an entirely new approach to software development, one that requires zero code and dramatically reduces the effort required for software maintenance.
Low-code/no-code platforms may sound promising in that respect. However, they still require you to write code for up to 20%, and sometimes as much as 30% of the functionality you need. That is code you have to manage and maintain going forward. In short, code quality remains your problem.
In other words, it’s technical debt waiting to happen.
But that manual code is just the tip of the iceberg. Behind the scenes, low-code/no-code platforms immediately turn each drag-and-drop specification into code. Furthermore, they often use a proprietary coding language that your developers may not even understand. And when it comes time for packaging, deploying, and rolling back that code, you often end up doing so manually, just like with traditional code-based development. The same is true for securing, managing, and upgrading those applications.
Unqork’s Enterprise App Cloud changes the equation. You can build secure, complex, enterprise-grade applications with zero code. This is possible because Unqork’s data-defined architecture completely separates configurations from code.
As a result, Unqork makes it far easier to handle all tasks across each phase of the SDLC, from infrastructure planning to upgrades, including:
Infrastructure planning & management
- No need to purchase or manage servers
- No dependencies to install
- No DNS to configure or URLs to hook up
- No manual management of scalability or availability
UI/Application development
- No need to need to master HTML/Javascript (or any code)
- No need to connect fields to databases
- No need to manually implement validations
- No need to manually build validation displays
Integrations
- No need to understand how to make requests or find libraries, codes, etc.
- No need to create secure store for credentials
- No need to manually build out logic of multiple authentication types
Database management
- No need to set up databases or establish connectivity
- No need to run commands to create or alter tables
- No queries to write
- No time or effort to scale or manage availability
Security
- No manual setup of secure user authentication
- No manual setup of secure data storage and encryption
- No manual setup for resiliency against cyber attacks
Deployment
- One-click deployments and rollbacks
- No broken builds
- No time spent on managing builds
Upgrades
- Only upgrade your business logic
- No code changes when upgrading applications
- No need to upgrade underlying tech as it evolves
So if you are committed to lowering your Technical Debt Score, why not embrace a zero-code approach like Unqork’s? By doing so, you embrace a future in which the challenges of managing legacy code are eliminated. And this means you can focus your team’s resources and talent on innovations that truly move your businesses forward.
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