Technical debt in development

Today we talk about a topic that is often removed from discussions in Agile teams: technical debt. The latter is as costly as monetary debt and is ultimately also a monetary debt: sooner or later you have to repay both.

In this article we explore what technical debt is, how it forms, why it is dangerous if not promptly addressed and above all, what strategies exist to reduce it or avoid it altogether.

The term 'technical debt' was coined by Ward Cunningham, one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, to describe the technical trade-offs between quality and speed. Technical debt is comparable to financial debt. You make a short-term decision to achieve a goal quickly, but then you have to live with the consequences of that choice, in the form of a lot of maintenance, bugs, or poor code quality.

Technical debt can arise for a variety of reasons. Among the most common are:

The main problem is that technical debt slows down development and lowers team productivity.

Let us now look at some typical scenarios in which public debt can form.

First, rushed releases with no quality assurance. This is a classic: a company wants to bring a new feature online in a few weeks. To save time, testing and code reviews are completely skipped. The feature is released, but it has numerous bugs. Within a few months, the entire team finds itself busy fixing bugs, instead of creating added value. Of course, not having bugs is also an added value, but that is achieved at the root when you don't bring bugs to the customer in the first place, thus also preserving your reputation. Automated testing and peer review are essential, the quality of a product must never be overlooked.

Another scenario is undocumented source code. The development team has been working on an old system for years that has not been updated. The system is replaced, but it still requires attention and no one can understand how the code works. Every small change leads to unexpected side effects that cannot be ignored. In cases like this, continuous refactoring and good documentation are needed, i.e. solutions to avoid these problems. Good documentation should contain what is necessary to communicate to colleagues who will take over the development what is important to know.

The third scenario is about technology choices with no future prospects. This scenario is especially true in the start-up sector, where there is a tendency to choose fast but poorly scalable technologies. After a couple of years, it turns out that the chosen technology can no longer keep up with the requirements. The product is good, there are many customers and the migration to a new platform is expensive and costly. When it comes to choosing technologies, one should have a long-term strategy and approach to scalability. For example, by planning cloud solutions, instead of preparing internal servers.

A first signal to identify technical debt in advance comes from regular and systematic code reviews: it is important to dedicate moments of comparison in the team to evaluate the readability, coherence and stability of the code. Including code reviews as an integral part of the Definition of Done ensures that no user story is considered finished without a careful verification of quality and maintainability.

Another key point to recognize technical debt is the quality of the code. You can use tools that measure the difficulty of maintaining a code, such as cyclomatic complexity problems, duplications, poor test coverage and other structural weaknesses that make the code fragile over time.

Finally, there are indirect but equally significant indicators: an increasing frequency of bugs, numerous tickets left open for a long time, errors in production or slowdowns in the release of new features are symptoms of unaddressed technical debt. Tracking these signals allows the team to act in advance, intervening on technical debt before it becomes a real burden for software development.

 Technical debt reduces the efficiency of IT development (especially speed, capacity and team morale) with which the existing IT system can be further developed with new functions and improved quality features.

It often worsens the user experience (especially operational efficiency and satisfaction) of an increasingly rigid, fragile and slow application, and
increases the risk of IT system failures, which in the worst case lead to significant professional damage.

Finally, it leads a company to repeatedly pay technical interest in the form of time, quality and costs (or nervousness) for the operation, further development and use of the IT system.

Debt accumulates as the system evolves and generally increases with the progressive life cycle. Accordingly, the interest burden also increases.

How can you reduce technical debt or keep it at bay in a healthy context? First of all, by giving the right priority to technical debt. In fact, it is not always negative. Sometimes it makes sense to opt for a short-term solution to achieve a business goal. The important thing is that this choice is consciously documented and planned.

Second, integrate refactoring frequently into the development process. Code should not only be written, but also updated regularly. The so-called Boy Scout Principle can be helpful: "Leave your code in a better state than you found it." The definition of "done" in the Scrum project is also crucial.

In planning meetings, you need to include space to define technical improvements. Successful teams consciously reserve 10-20% of sprint capacity for technical debt reduction and plan the sprint to fill it to 100%.

Another important aspect is the ability to take developer feedback seriously. Developers, especially those who have been working on the project for a while, know what causes technical debt. If you work on a project on a daily basis, you also develop a good intuition about what causes problems, and regular meetings help identify the biggest friction points.

Technical debt is an unavoidable reality in software development, but this does not mean it should be overlooked or ignored. Like financial debt, it can be useful in the short term to gain speed, but requires awareness, management and constant interventions to avoid compromising the quality of the project in the long term.

Recognizing, monitoring and addressing it systematically - through code reviews, good engineering practices and analysis tools - allows teams to maintain control over the code and preserve the sustainability of development. Investing in reducing technical debt is not a waste of time, but an act of care towards the future of the software, the satisfaction of the team and the competitiveness of the entire product.