Technical debt, which is taking short-term shortcuts at the expense of more stable long-term options, seems to be a more prevalent problem today than it was a few years ago – before 2020 specifically. This problem has actually existed for decades, but it is impossible to see or measure it.
Nonetheless, it’s likely to be more prevalent now, with the recent digital rush spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic leading to technical debt that could be bigger than it has ever been.
To support these assumptions, a survey published last year by Software AG found that 78% of organizations have accumulated more technical debt during the pandemic.
Increasingly present technical debt
Technical debt is a growing concern. For managers, the priority remains of course the problem of skills, but the technical debt comes just behind. This is demonstrated by a recent survey conducted by IDG/Foundry among 400 IT executives.
An overwhelming majority of executives surveyed, 86%, believe they have been impacted by technical debt in the past 12 months. The authors of the survey define “technical debt” as “the measure of the cost of reprocessing a solution caused by choosing an easy, but limited solution”. Among the fallout from technical debt, 43% of respondents cite limited ability to innovate, 41% difficulty meeting service level agreements, and 37% failures and downtime.
“It looks like the technical debt accumulated during the Covid-19 pandemic will follow CIOs for several years,” notes Keri Allan in a January post at IDG. “In their rush to keep their business running, many organizations have found themselves with ill-fitting or unnecessarily complex technology solutions. And to specify, taking the example of “quick fixes that many companies have adopted”, such as the acceleration of “the adoption of SaaS productivity applications such as Zoom, MS Teams, G-Suite or Office 365 “. In addition, she adds, “the short-term cloud implementation also led to not always having the time to choose the right type of solution for this service. Which could have led to unexpectedly high bills, or “cloud shock.” »
A hidden debt
While IT managers seem to be aware of this overload, technical debt is not so easy to detect. “The problem is that most of the time, technical debt is secret – an unknown, undefined off-balance sheet liability,” says technology analyst Wayne Sadin, quoted in a Cutter Consortium article.
So what’s the best way to commit resources to manage technical debt? It would be counterproductive to spend most of your time trying to reorganize the systems and solutions in place. In this case, there would be no time to work on new initiatives for the company, and the technical debt would increase further.
With that in mind, one seasoned tech developer suggested spending no more than 25% of your time redesigning and rebuilding the least productive solutions.
How to sort out the debt?
But as with all challenges, there are many variations of Technical Debt. John DeWyze, developer at Shopify, therefore suggests applying the 25% rule to four levels of debt:
- The daily debt: for John DeWyze, it is necessary to devote 10% of his time (4 hours per week) to the development of the code under development at this precise moment. “Engineers should be allowed and outright encouraged to use up to 4 hours a week if they want to try to improve the code in an area they come across, if they feel it would benefit. »
- The weekly debt: it’s “debt that can be solved by adding a card or issue to a sprint”, and specialists should spend at least 10% of their time on this too. “To take a telling example, it’s as if we were going to implement new code and we discovered that we had a more efficient or cleaner way of doing it. We might even refactor adjacent code to use our new code, which would make things even simpler and improve our internal APIs. »
- Monthly or annual debt: it amounts to reviewing projects, or even remedying them. Developers should devote at least 5% of their time to it. It is a “debt that takes months to repay”, specifies the specialist. Annual debt requires rewrites, the kind of debt “where after many conversations someone concludes that a rewrite is the only solution”. John Dewyze notes that the 5% announced come back “to meetings of two hours a week to discuss planning”.
Technical debt is an evil that we hear a lot about, but few organizations know where to start to untangle it. Sometimes they even decide to solve the problem to throw away their current solutions and start from scratch. Devoting some of the time to sorting out debt — but not too much — can at least help strike a good balance.
Source: ZDNet.com