- A rush to meet deadlines: Time constraints often force teams to take shortcuts, leading to substandard code that must be dealt with later. Your tech leadership team must prioritize tasks effectively and track postponed work to ensure it ultimately gets addressed.
- Unclear project requirements: When goals are vaguely written or not well thought out, teams may produce code that doesn’t really align with the underlying needs. Work done early on to define clear requirements can pay off later with cleaner code.
- Poorly written code: One of the main sources of tech debt, sloppy code makes future development and refactoring slow and inefficient; well-structured code, on the other hand, is easier to maintain and integrate with new features.
- Inadequate documentation: If poorly documented, even well-written code will cost your team and their successors wasted time and effort down the line. Establishing strong documentation from the start may take time, but will ultimately reduce effort going forward.
- Inevitable system evolution: Even well-designed codebases require ongoing maintenance due to evolving business needs, security threats, and outdated technologies. Code can “drift” due to dependencies on other packages or minor tweaks that have unintended consequences. In some ways this is the most insidious cause of tech debt, and should be guarded against.
How to measure and manage technical debt
One important difference between financial and technical debt: It’s much easier to quantify how much money you owe than it is to figure out your exact level of technical debt. There are techniques to help, however; for instance, in a whitepaper, CodeScene suggests a strategy in which you measure your team’s unplanned work, which is a good stand-in for time spent cleaning up tech debt they’ve inherited.
Even if you can’t hang a number on your debt, you still need to get a handle on it. Andrew Sharp, research director at Info-Tech Research Group, is a strong advocate for tracking technical debt. He advises IT leaders to document their most critical technical debt, understand its business impact, and establish a clear process for resolving it.
Understanding what technical debt you have is the first step to managing it. CIO’s Mary K. Pratt has a deep dive on how tech leaders should approach managing technical debt: You need to prioritize it on your road maps, think about it as a business risk, and be sure that when you do take on new debt, it’s in the planned/prudent quadrant.
