Tech debt is inevitable and cannot be avoided by any software development company. This is a debt which you can pay off now or later that depends on your discretion but be assured that repayment of technical debt along with the interest accrued is a crucial and compulsory aspect for a software development company. Technical debt can be incurred knowingly or unknowingly by the software development team. When there is a continuous pressure from the outside to meet the deadlines of a release development teams tend to cut corners to meet with such demand and incurs tech debt knowingly in anticipation that it will be rectified in due course of time.
Why Your Tech Debt Never Works Out the Way You Plan
Reviewing Is Necessary
Tech debt can also be a result of the ignorance of the development team regarding the latest requirements, tools and techniques. Moreover, an old code may have tech debt accumulated over time and the team or person that designed it may not be around this time due to job transfer. Therefore proper and regular reviewing of codes with the use of suitable metrics is essential to identify and locate tech debt presence in a code. This will enable you to identify the various attributes of technical debt which includes unrealistic schedules, use of inexperienced resources, lack of proper code reviews and testing, unrefined code requirements, fewer code comments and little use of framework and patterns.
Categories Of Tech Debt
There are different categories in which tech debt can be classified which may be the result of fast and improper completion of the job, lack or professionalism, and procrastination of refactoring. Tech debt especially occurs when someone knows that maintenance of the code is not his responsibility. Tech debt can also be the result of poor and convoluted designing, defects in architectural structure, hard coded elements. It can also be a result of abstraction, lack of separating concerns and presence of questionable objects in the code. Accordingly, tech debt is categorized which may be both good and bad for the company depending on the time and amount of defect in the code.
Some Other Types
There are a few other types of tech debts found in a software development company. One such kind is the API debt. This specific debt is not granular and therefore it has long strings of faulty codes. Such debts are the results of poor error handling. These debts reduces the velocity of the code in functioning, makes it unresponsive and all these are effects of poor code structure. Tech debts can also be due to quality issues which are results of poor test coverage, little automation, and inadequate unit and performance tests conducted.
Comparing All Tech Debts
Apart from it, there are infrastructure debts which are results of old and not scalable equipment, full of unrealistic data and recovery plan, little replication and sloppy deployment. Therefore, you must compare all tech debts before you consider which one to pay and which one to retain just like you do for all the financial debts before including it in your repayment list with bill consolidation loans. All this will help you to get out of the black hole of technical debt.
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