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How to Pay Technical Debt

Technical debt is an important concept to understand and address in your development lifecycle. Find out what it is and what you can do to pay for it.

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Architecture (hardware)

There are also reasons why your company might be willing to take on technical debt. One of the most widespread reasons is when the delivery time is more important than the integrity or cleanliness of the delivered code. If your company loses money due to a delay, incurring technical debt may be acceptable.

Of course, once you incur technical debt, you'll have to figure out how to pay it off sooner or later. How can you do that? Let's look at some of the ways.

1. Find appointments

The first thing you should do is go back to the drawing board to figure out the compromises you made that led to the debt you incurred. Were the compromises that you chose to follow JavaScript instead of Java to speed up implementation? Or perhaps you chose to forgo certain features you wanted in order to deploy the software sooner. Your technical debt may also have been incurred by not implementing security throughout the development lifecycle. This is a specific type of debt that you will pay off for some time.

You may also have purchased an infrastructure (like a cloud host) or an architecture (like a server) that is only capable of meeting your current demand, but not the demand you expect in the near future. These are cost commitments, a form of technical debt that can be easily remedied by purchasing more cloud resources or more powerful hardware.

When locating the initial commitments, you must decide whether it is possible to pay off the technical debt and how quickly you can do so. Is it possible for your internal developers to resolve project deficiencies in a logical and efficient manner? And can technical debt be mitigated easily or will the entire project need to be scrapped?

2. Make security a priority

You must resolve the technical debt incurred by the title (or lack thereof). Everyone involved needs to look at the project to figure out how they can implement security and inject it into every stage of the project (even when it's already implemented).

You might also consider creating a new team dedicated to controlling development lifecycle security. This team would be responsible for ensuring that security best practices were applied throughout all phases of the project. And even if a current project cannot benefit from the existence of the new team, all other future projects will be able to.

3. Don't ignore your developers

Developers are the best way to pay off technical debt. They know the project inside and out and can tell you exactly where you got into debt during the project lifecycle. You may be inclined to not listen to their warnings or advice and prefer to give more credit to those in management positions. This is a mistake. By not listening to your developers, your technical debt will increase exponentially.

To this end, you should hold regular meetings with your developers and give them agency to make changes. Once you empower your developers, they will be able to enable your company to effectively pay off technical debt. Ignore their advice and the debt will continue to increase.

4. Include technical debt in your strategy

The worst thing you can do is ignore technical debt. It won't go away on its own. In fact, the longer you ignore technical debt, the more debt you will have and the harder it will be to pay it off. Therefore, you need to include technical debt in your company and development strategy.

To be more specific, you should include technical debt at every stage of your development lifecycle. By doing this, you will be much better prepared to understand exactly when and where the debt occurred and how best to pay it off.

By integrating technical debt into your development lifecycle, you will never be caught off guard and ill-prepared when it comes time to pay off that technical debt. As your project progresses through its lifecycle, be sure to keep track of all potential maintenance costs so you can prioritize which debt should be paid off first. For example, if an aspect of a project requires significant development hours to pay off, that should be a priority. Make sure you include this in the lifecycle.

5. Live with it

Another way to pay off technical debt may not be the most desirable – but at some point, it may become a necessary means to an obvious end. Let's say your developers had to give up a specific feature in a piece of software, simply to meet a delivery deadline. If the software works reasonably well, you may decide to live with the functionality it offers and forget about the feature you left out.

By going this route, you can always get this extra functionality in v2 of the software, or perhaps in another project. In any case, if you do without this feature, the debt will be paid in full.

Conclusion

There are many ways to incur technical debt as a way to pay it off. The most important thing, however, is that you don't ignore technical debt and make sure you pay it off before it accrues too much “interest.” If you're mired in technical debt, you (and your business) will always feel stuck behind software that doesn't work as desired, isn't as secure as needed, or loses your business money.

Source: BairesDev

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