How to Measure Technical Debt: A Guide for IT Stakeholders

I. Understanding Technical Debt for Enterprise Applications

The speed of technological innovation keeps accelerating. The tools available to today’s enterprises are extraordinary. So, why do so many IT departments, weighed down by technical debt, have so much trouble making even small, incremental changes? 

Invariably, the problem comes down to managing debt. IT organizations around the world are burdened by an estimated $1.52 trillion in technical debt, according to reporting in the Wall Street Journal. No wonder they have so few resources to devote to business agility and innovation. 

Why does technical debt build up so quickly? Because for every new application you create, you must ensure that hundreds, even thousands, of code-based legacy applications keep running in the background— some of them are decades old at this point.  And if you build new apps with a code—or even a low-code/no-code solution, as we will see—they start adding to your mountain of technical debt as soon as they go live. 

To overcome the problem of technical debt, you first need to be able to understand how to measure technical debt. Then, you have to identify its causes. And finally, you need a sustainable way to eliminate it in the future. The following guide helps you:

• Define technical debt, including hidden sources that stakeholders may be missing.
• Measure technical debt and work toward your Technical Debt Score. 
• Understand why low-code/no-code solutions don’t solve the problem of technical debt.
• Eliminate technical debt with the unique zero-code approach of Unqork’s Enterprise App Cloud. 
  

II. Understanding the concept of technical debt—including hidden sources

Gartner defines technical debt as the work that is “‘owed’ to an IT system when teams ‘borrow’ against long-term quality.” This generally happens because teams are forced to take shortcuts and workarounds to meet delivery deadlines. These shortcuts result in all kinds of problems, from performance to scalability and resilience. While the finance department may not include technical debts in their reporting, it functions very much like financial debt.

With the total amount of the world’s technical debt amounting to $1.52 trillion, it’s not surprising that 91% of CIOs report that tech debt is their biggest challenge, according to a 2023 Intelligent CIO report. Yet, more than 50% of tech practitioners have never systematically tried to identify or manage tech debt, according to a 2022 Journal of Systems and Software study. 

How a talent shortage compounds the problem

If you’re facing project backlogs, your challenge is probably compounded by the fact that there aren’t enough developers around to help build the applications you need if you rely on code. It’s hard to find the right talent these days, especially if you’re building with an outdated programming language like COBOL. Meanwhile, new technologies and the skills they require are evolving so rapidly that the demand for experienced professionals is growing faster than those who actually do know the technology.

If your organization is burdened by lots of technical debt, your employees end up spending most of their time performing simple, routine tasks just to keep the lights on. That leaves them working under constant pressure, yet on uninspiring tasks instead of creating innovative and value-driving projects.

And, a frustrated developer is more likely to search for employment elsewhere. The talent you do retain tends to suffer from poor morale, per one study—not a great recipe for maintaining a motivated, productive team.

Here are the forms of technical debt that are weighing them down. 

App-versioning technical debt

Given the complexity of today’s large, interconnected applications, releasing business-critical features has become slow and expensive. IT teams must implement robust processes like CI/CD, comprehensive testing, and manual QA. And they must coordinate parallel work across teams and minimize errors due to poor code quality.

Security-related tech debt

Code is everywhere, and it’s inherently insecure. Code-based vulnerabilities lie within application development repositories, open source dependencies, and even security controls. Many of these vulnerabilities are not yet known (at least publicly). As a result, organizations often spend significant resources to manage technical debt—i.e. rework code manually to eliminate common software vulnerabilities, manage burden of vulnerability triage, prioritize efforts, etc.

Integration-related tech debt

In the age of digital transformation, enterprise applications today must integrate seamlessly with other systems and third-party services. Configuring these integrations with code is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and error prone, even when developers follow best practices. Any changes in downstream systems can lead to serious problems, too—and lots of manual refactoring.

Deployment tech debt

Does your organization have a long list of overdue or backlogged applications? This, too, is a form of technical debt. For example, discovering new bugs in production shortly after a release is a classic sign of deployment debt. These delays cut into your return on investment (ROI). They can also indicate that you face more serious issues within your operations processes or tech stack. 

COBOL-related tech debt

So many critical functions still run on COBOL, a 60-year-old language. Around 800 billion lines of COBOL are still in use around the world, according to a ZDnet report—including 95% of ATM transactions and 80% of in-person bank transactions. Of course, all that coding makes software maintenance expensive, a problem compounded by a shortage of talented COBOL coders.

III. Quantifying and triaging your technical debt

Once you’ve identified the sources of your organization’s technical debt, you’re ready to learn how to measure technical debt and then quantify it. McKinsey’s Tech Debt Score (TDS) providing organizations a quick way to measure the cost of tech debt and 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 score is based on the analysis of tech debt at 220 companies across seven industries, which uncovered significant connections between TDS and business performance. Organizations with high scores (i.e. with less technical debt) tended to demonstrate higher revenue growth, while lower TDS performance was assoicated with failed efforts to modernize IT—and therefore tech debts that tended to grow over time.

Specific measurable factors of tech debt include:

• Defect ratio
• Code churn
• Technical debt ratio (TDR)
• Code duplication
• Cyclomatic complexity
• Open bug count and age
• Test coverage
• Time to market (TTM)
• Lead time
• Changed failure rate
• Number of failed CI/CD events
• New bugs vs. closed bugs

Time to triage

Not all technical debt is alike. Just as we prioritize payment of financial debts according to interest rates or due dates, organizations should prioritize tackling technical debt in terms of both the risk involved and the degree to which they are slowing innovation or increasing costs. By implementing a systematic triage process, organizations can strategically allocate resources, mitigate high-impact issues, and foster a sustainable approach to managing technical debt.

Steps to optimize managing technical debt include: 

• Assess. Begin by assessing the impact of each debt component on your overall organization.
• Prioritize. Organize issues based on their severity, i.e. how much they negatively affect functionality or slow business agility. 
• Collaborate. Establish standards for prioritization, from customer impact to strategic alignment. This requires collaborating with cross-functional teams to gather diverse insights.
• Visualize. Consider management software or other tools to create a visual representation of your technical debt backlog. This facilitates transparent communication and decision-making, essential elements to managing technical debt.
• Review. Assess progress and prioritize efforts to meet evolving project goals and new challenges. 

III. Why low-code/no-code platforms aren’t the answer 

While low-code/no-code can accelerate some aspects of application development, it does not eliminate code. When you need to build anything complex or innovative, you inevitably have to stitch together components of the application together using code. And when it comes time to manage, change, debug, and test apps, all that code inevitably results in all the forms of tech debt detailed above, from slower deployments and app versioning problems to security and integration issues.

Low-code/no-code solutions also come with other shortcomings, including:

• Proprietary scripting. This requires time and resources spent on training, cutting into developer productivity. 
• Rigidity. Upgrades, enhancements, and integrations tend to be slower and more expensive than expected—and often come with security risks.
• Closed standards. Low-code/no-code platforms are generally built on closed standards, which makes it more difficult to work with modern UI technologies.
• Not cloud-native. Many of the largest low-code/no-code platforms were developed before the advent of the cloud, making cloud migrations problematic, even impossible.

IV. How Unqork’s zero-code approach eliminates technical debt before it happens

Most tech debt boils down to the cost of maintaining (i.e. painstakingly fixing and/or updating existing code). And enterprises often run hundreds of codebases—sometimes even thousands. As we have seen, all those languages and lines of code add up to a huge problem when it comes to security, scalability, and maintenance. 

Uniquely, the Unqork Enterprise App Cloud enables you to build applications that are “pure configurations”—even for sophisticated, complex, enterprise-grade apps. Developers create them in a visual, drag-and-drop environment, all with zero code. This is possible because Unqork handles 100% of the underlying code—along with the security, compliance, and upgradeability challenges that come with it. Here is a deep dive on codeless architecture that explains how it’s revolutionizing application development.

As a result, there is no proprietary script because, again, there is no scripting at all. Integrations, iterations, and enhancements become much faster and easier to build, test, and deploy. As a result, organizations can focus precious resources on business innovation, unlock true business agility, and meet changing customer demands.

“We were saddled with tech debt from legacy systems that we just couldn’t scale,” says Amy Friedrich President of US Insurance Solutions, Principal . “We couldn’t get it to work together. So when Unqork articulated that’s what they do, we’re like ‘We’re in! We’ll partner. Let’s grow together.’” 

Here are the ways that Unqork accelerates development, provides insights on how to measure technical debt, and eliminates both coding and technical debt across the software development life cycle (SDLC):

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 & optimization

• Only upgrade your business logic
• No code changes when upgrading applications
• No need to upgrade underlying tech as it evolves

While the Enterprise App Cloud speeds and simplifies development, it is the value it delivers across the software development life cycle that makes it a truly transformational technology. 

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