Technical Debt is like a Very Significant Loan From Your Bank
Would you take out a loan for your business if you didn’t know the interest rate or the terms of the loan? I don’t think so, but in effect that is exactly what many organisations do when they fail to identify the level and impact of Technical Debt within their systems landscape.
Technical Debt is very similar to taking out a bank loan but at rates far in excess of that which would be considered acceptable. Rates of 30, 40 or even as high as 50%!
There are many studies out there by the likes of Gartner and McKinsey that show that cloud engineers spend almost a third of their time managing technical debt arising from poorly architected cloud infrastructures or still using legacy systems, and software engineers spend anything between 25 and 40% longer on delivering new function and features because they have to resolve issues relating to Technical Debt arising from different platforms, poorly managed code, lack of proper testing, a failure to adopt microservices amongst many other causes.
And can you believe that in many organisations if they adopt a well-thought-out strategy to tackle technical debt, they could reduce their lead times to delivering key function and feature almost 50% quicker?
The longer you delay paying down the Technical Debt, the more interest you accumulate, and the harder it becomes to make changes to your system and develop an agile approach to delivering new function and features that make you competitive.
It is time for everyone to understand what Technical Debt is and what the impact can have on an organisation.
First Steps – Identify the causes of technical debt which might include:
Ongoing development, where old solutions become outdated or inefficient over time.
- Insufficient up-front definition, where requirements are unclear or change during development.
- Multiple databases in legacy systems when there should be one version of the truth.
- Reliance on third-party solutions where upgrades require significant changes to process or architecture.
- Business pressures, where speed is prioritised over quality or completeness.
- Lack of process or understanding, where the concept of technical debt is ignored or misunderstood.
- Tightly coupled components, where the system is not modular or flexible enough to adapt to changing needs.
- Lack of a test suite, where bugs are not detected or fixed properly.
- Lack of documentation, where the code is not explained or commented well.
- Lack of collaboration, where knowledge is not shared or transferred among developers.
Next Step – Prioritise your Tecnical Debt in terms of Impact on New Development and Value
It pays dividends to employ a third party to corroborate what technical debt you think you have, and to carry out an assessment which will help prioritise the list. It is essential this is done in collaboration with the Development and Cloud teams, as it must not be seen so much as a “whitch hunt”, but something that makes everyone’s life easier and allow the IT Delivery Teams to exel. It also has the benefit of demonstrating to the leadership team the importance of allocating resources to resolving the technical debt.
Once the list is prioritised and an resource and cost estimate for each item has been estimated, then it is important to develop a Road Map for the planned reduction for the next 12 to 24 months.
Some items might be that important that it is imperative to to get it done sooner than exiting resources allow for. That is when it’s worth considering some flexible options.
Using SASDH Nearshore Software and Cloud Engineers
The South Africa Software Development Hub can provide you with a flexible resource to come in and fix technical debt whilst your in-house teams continue with the critical mission of releasing new apps and enhancing existing services, alternatively SASDH can provide you with highly skilled software developers, automated testers, DevSecOps, cloud engineers, project managers, scrum managers etc, that can take on a complete product development working with your product team.
The SASDH rates make this a compelling option as our rates are typically 50% less than UK, and 30% less than Eastern European countries. When comparing to other countries such as India, whilst the rates might be comparable, the SA contractors work within the UK and Europe Time Zones, have a culture, language and humour like the UKand have a work ethic that exceeds nearly all the other countries that provide offshore and nearshore services.
Contact me: Andrew Jones +44 7799544973 andrew.jones@sasdh.net
