Was your company's software system once sleek and nimble, but now, it has been rendered a tangled web of shortcuts, patches, and workarounds? Welcome to the realm of technical debt, a silent saboteur that accumulates over time and threatens your efficiency.
What Is Technical Debt?
Think of technical debt as a loan that developers take out in order to allow them to acquire something faster (such as completing a software feature request before a tight deadline). However, that loan eventually needs to be paid back. Technical debt accumulates from companies using shortcuts to get around IT issues instead of using proper, sustainable methods to fix them. Quick fixes might seem harmless at the start, but as your system grows, the unoptimized code can compound, slowing processes down and creating additional complications. Technical debt must be dealt with to maintain a robust, efficient tech environment.
Identify and Prioritize Technical Debt Management
The first step to remedy technical debt is obviously to identify where technical debt exists. Conduct an audit of your network infrastructure and processes to identify and document areas where shortcuts or quick fixes have been used, and optimizations could be made. Use the audit to create and maintain a register of all the technical debt within your organization, which makes it easier to track what has and has not been addressed. It is important to note that not all technical debts have the same level of impact on your performance, so they should be categorized according to their individual impact on performance, security, and maintainability. The more impact a debt has, the more critical it is to address that debt first.
Integrate Debt Management into Your Workflow
Most organizations can't realistically dedicate all the time needed to fix all their technical debt in one go. So, instead, incorporating some time for debt management into your regular workflow helps maintain a balance between new development and debt reduction. Additionally, keep track of the progress you make, cleaning up technical debt so you can keep your technical debt register up-to-date and directly measure the efficiency improvements you gain.
Educate and Train Your Team
Educating your team about technical debt, along with promoting awareness of its impacts on your systems and projects, helps prevent new debt and addresses existing issues. Group training and knowledge sharing foster a culture of quality and long-term thinking that helps stop technical debt from accumulating. Providing training on best practices for adopting new technology is a critical step for avoiding technical debt.
Improve Documentation
Comprehensive documentation is an incredible tool for both avoiding and correcting technical debt. Documentation can provide team members with a clear reference of your existing systems and how they work so they can use them to optimize updates or new developments. Documentation of your existing systems should include hardware configurations, software setups, and network diagrams; additionally, it should be regularly updated to reflect any changes that are made. It is a good idea to use standardized templates for your documentation to ensure consistency, which can make documentation more intuitive to create, maintain, and understand.
Regularly Update and Refactor Systems
Regular updates and system refactoring help keep technical debt under control by making changes to improve technology quality. To see the most return from your updates, focus on high-impact areas that are frequently used or critical to performance. However, it is important to schedule these updates during non-busy times in case issues occur and create downtime. Additionally, whenever making changes to critical systems, you should make small, manageable changes rather than large overhauls that come with greater risk of issues.
Manage Dependencies
Effective dependency management is another good way to reduce the risk of introducing new technical debt by ensuring compatibility and security. Dependencies should be kept updated with any security patches and performance improvements. Dependency management tools are helpful tools for handling dependencies that can automate updates and ensure compatibility. Finally, it is a good idea to isolate critical dependencies to reduce their impact.
Foster a Culture of Continuous Improvement
Just like with cybersecurity, in order to avoid technical debt, your organization needs to have a culture of continuous improvement that addresses technical debt proactively. A knowledgeable team is better equipped to address technical debt and avoid unoptimized developments that create it in the first place. You can encourage this kind of culture by offering resources for learning and celebrating successes to drive ongoing enhancement.
Addressing technical debt proactively ensures your systems remain scalable, maintainable, and secure, which enables your business to thrive in a competitive landscape.