Technical Debt a detail oriented approach.pptx

Technical Debt

1. Technical Debt details

2. What is technical debt? The term “technical debt” was coined in 1992 by computer scientist Ward Cunningham to vividly illustrate the long-term consequences of the short-term compromises and workarounds developers often incorporate into their code. Much like financial debt, where borrowing money now leads to interest payments later, technical debt accumulates “interest” through increased development time, decreased system stability, and the potential for future bugs or failures.As TechTarget explains, technical debt is an inevitable consequence of the “build now, fix later” mentality that sometimes pervades software development projects. With tight deadlines, limited resources, or evolving requirements, developers may opt for quick-and-dirty solutions rather than investing the time and effort to build robust, scalable, and maintainable code. In essence, technical debt is the result of prioritizing speed over quality. While these shortcuts may seem beneficial in the short term, allowing teams to meet deadlines or deliver features faster, they can significantly impact reliability down the line. Just as ignoring financial debt can lead to financial ruin, neglecting technical debt can crush a software project, making it increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain, modify, or extend.

3. The snowball effect Technical debt doesn’t just remain static; it accumulates over time. As teams implement more quick fixes and workarounds, the codebase becomes increasingly convoluted, complex, and difficult to understand. This, in turn, makes it harder for developers to identify and fix bugs, add new features, or refactor the code to improve its quality. The result is a vicious cycle where technical debt begets more technical debt, leading to a gradual decline in the software’s overall health and performance. Growing technical debt signifies that the complexity of the code is increasing, which will eventually require untangling and negatively impact code quality. Understanding the nature of technical debt and its potential consequences is the first step toward managing it effectively. Although the impacts of technical debt can be gradual, they can result in massive disadvantages in the long run.

4. Disadvantages of technical debt Since no software development project ever has all the time or resources required to produce a perfect codebase, some technical debt is unavoidable. That’s not necessarily bad if an application’s technical debt is promptly “paid off.” Otherwise, just as with financial debt, the costs of repaying the “principal” plus the “interest” on the debt can eventually reach crippling proportions. The “principal” portion of technical debt is the cost of fixing the original code, dependencies, and frameworks to enable it to function in today’s technology environment. The “interest” is the added cost of maintaining such applications, which continues to compound over time. The challenge is keeping an aging and inflexible legacy application running as it becomes increasingly incompatible with the rapidly changing modern infrastructure it operates on top of. Technical debt can significantly hinder a company’s ability to innovate. According to a recent U.S. study, more than half of respondents dedicate at least a quarter of their annual budget to technical debt. Poorly written code is a common form of technical debt, often leading to increased maintenance costs and reduced code quality.