If you’re not releasing applications on time (or at all) due to technical debt and other issues, you’re probably struggling with deployment debt.
All IT stakeholders understand the concept of technical debt—the long-term costs involved in choosing stop-gap software solutions and infrastructure over long-term remedies. For example, when you keep adding on to a buggy legacy system without fixing underlying issues in the codebase, you’re adding to your enterprise’s technical debt because of all the rework and workarounds these solutions require. Or perhaps your application is working fine, but it lacks the scalability it to meet the needs of a growing organization and fails to deliver modern user experiences.
As more issues or glitches arise and you keep putting them off until later, your “balance” grows, technical debt becomes harder and harder to pay down, and optimization and innovation are forgotten, because so many resources are going toward keeping the lights on.
Did you know that there’s a hidden form of technical debt that enterprises need to keep an eye on? It’s called deployment debt. As with financial debt, it doesn’t take long to rack up a high balance.
What is deployment debt vs. technical debt?
Deployment debt begins to accrue interest when your engineers are unable to push applications to production on time due to technical and code quality issues. You end up accruing a long list of overdue or backlogged applications and endless code reviews, which slows business agility and cuts into the return on your investment (ROI). Deployment debt is very common among today’s enterprises, but many teams don’t think of this as “debt” or something that needs to be addressed.
Discovering new bugs in production shortly after a release is a classic sign of deployment debt.
Deployment debt is bad in itself—nobody likes being behind on releases—but it’s also often an indicator of deeper issues within your operations processes or tech stack. For example, discovering new bugs in production shortly after a release is a classic sign of deployment debt. Bugs in general are often a sign of technical debt, as are other defects in your overall application development process.
How can you recognize deployment debt? A very simple way is to count how many commits haven’t made it to production. If that number is higher than usual, there’s probably a larger problem at hand, and deployment debt might be right around the corner. You can also track the number of days since your team’s last release. If you’re weeks or even months behind schedule, you know you are facing significant deployment debt.
How to avoid deployment-related technical debt with Unqork
Like technical debt, any enterprise that’s been in business for while is bound to have accrue deployment debt. As long as you’re aware of your deployment debt balance, working consistently to “pay it off,” and doing your best to not increase the balance, you’re doing a good job. Still, there are many best practices you can adopt to keep your deployment debt to a minimum.
The most important thing you can do to avoid deployment debt is to use a platform like the Unqork Enterprise App Cloud, which optimizes release management. Any change is reflected automatically within the Unqork platform, so there’s never a question of who made what changes when. Thanks to this level of transparency, our customers speed up the deployment process, remove the burden of maintenance, and reduce deployment debt and other forms of technical debt.
Unqork also aids complex release processes, so you can deploy applications quickly and securely. Advanced RBAC capabilities allow you to manage user access and track changes made to your application. Plus, you can store multiple versions and live actions of your application on Unqork for release and review. With these features, it’s faster and easier to check applications for bugs and glitches before they get deployed, so you don’t have to pull them back in the future. You also avoid design debt—all the shortcomings in your product UX and design processes that tend to increase over time.
Here are some other tips for avoiding deployment debt:
1. Adopt a continuous delivery approach
This software development practice ensures that your application is always in a deployable state, meaning that changes are automatically prepared for release once they’ve been made. Continuous delivery is part of what makes building, modifying, and releasing applications on Unqork so fast and secure.
2. Use a platform with robust recovery features
Having recovery protocols for disasters, failures, and other problems rapidly restores your app and mitigates damage. Unqork’s recovery features enable you to restore applications to a previous state after an unexpected event, so you can bounce back quickly and reduce downtime. The Unqork platform also leverages failure detection capabilities within each tier of your application, containing failures automatically with redundant data backups.
3. Build on a platform that reduces bugs
Unqork’s platform can reduce bugs by 600x, before you even start testing. This ensures that your app is always working as it should. It also reduces the cost of software maintenance and technical debt going forward. Our state-of-the-art QA function combines automation with human ingenuity to maintain stability throughout our applications. Whenever workflows and components are created or changed, they are tested thoroughly so you can always build without the fear of new bugs popping up upon deployment. And you never need to worry about refactoring code, because the applications you build in Unqork have zero code to begin with.
All of this (and more!) is possible when building with Unqork. Tackle your deployment-related technical debt today with our powerful platform, which will further streamline application development and future-proof your enterprise without writing any code. As you create with Unqork you’ll notice your deployment debt shrinking and making way for even more possibilities.
To learn more about Unqork, take a self-guided tour of our platform. You can also sign up for the Unqork newsletter or schedule a personalized demonstration with one of our in-house experts today.
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