Technical Debts - To be paid with interest

Technical debt is a deferred re factoring, in other words, necessary work which is delayed now and it impedes future development.

Whenever you have a new piece of functionality to be added to your system. There are always two ways that come to a programmers mind, one which is quick to do but is messy – about which you are sure that it will make further changes harder in the future.

The other one results in a cleaner design, but will take a longer time to put in place. In most of the cases' deadline dominate the best solutions and the second approach is preferred over the first.

Technical debts consists of the gap between the delivered launch and the ideal launch, which means taking a loan today against the time required to do future work.

KEY INSIGHTS:

Parameters that leads to technical debts:

• Managerial pressure exerted to meet deadlines
• Poor brainstorming and blind implementation of changes
• Poor leadership
• Isolated development which leads to gap of knowledge of the product within the team.
• Lack of knowledge of impact areas for a change at both developing team and the client side.

Effects caused by technical debts:

• Short-lived product
• Makes it difficult to incorporate future changes without significant effort
• Maintenance mode becomes more of a process of completing the incomplete code and not maintaining the software.

How to avoid technical debts:

• Documenting the code and including the description of impact areas which provides the correct product knowledge to the person changing it.
• Pre-implementation team discussions and a transparent communication with the client can lead to quality decisions.
• Decreasing the gaps between delivery and optimal delivery.
• Good mentoring and information flow between the team members about the product.