What is Technical Debt?

Technical debt isn’t intended to be a mystical concept that requires a Ph.D. to understand. What it boils down to is that due to previous decisions made, a product is most likely too convoluted to maintain or add new functionality. In this situation, the recommended mitigation action would be to abandon the product and develop a new one.

How Does it Happen?

The most common reasons tend to fall under lack of experienced developers combined with poor architecture decisions made during the selection of the underlying technology.

The first aspect is pretty straightforward. Many vendors may offer to complete a project with a much lower project budget than needed, but the project ends up sacrificing quality. By no means do we intend to demean junior developers. The truth of the matter is that everyone has to start somewhere and build up their experience and knowledge to become one of the mythical graybeards that are often encountered in the IT world. We happen to combat issues resulting from inexperience by capitalizing on an experienced team that has completed many successful projects for a range of industries and businesses of all sizes.

The second aspect tends to result from jumping on the buzzword bandwagon. Every single day there seems to be a new language or framework appearing in the landscape. Some of these projects can be quite useful, although that doesn’t contain a guarantee by any means. When evaluating the architecture with a client, we’ve learned that its always best to employ time proven technology by avoiding the newest shiny object to enter the market and to utilize community supported options with a large following for open source technology. We definitely don’t intend to seem that we discount emerging technologies, we just manage to apply an appropriate balance to make sure that a technology is not incorporated until it has been thoroughly evaluated.

Can it be Fixed?

This is a difficult question to answer for many reasons. The most common one being that while it may be possible, it would not be recommended as the potential for a catastrophic situation is only enhanced. We’ve definitely helped clients address certain issues with software that would make most developers run away quicker than you can say hello. In these cases, we understand that our clients are the ones out in the ocean without a life preserver and we just can’t in good conscience leave them on their own.

How to Avoid Technical Debt

By now, you should have determined that it isn’t impossible to escape the clutches of technical debt. We simplify the maintenance of an existing product by always using the latest, stable releases available for the incorporated technology to ensure that any bugs or issues are minimized, as well as to maximize the software support period provided by the vendor.

To avoid issues with determining how the underlying software functions, we make sure to always document our code accordingly. Due to the complexity of developing custom software, we want to make sure that any future maintenance is not only possible, but also easy to accommodate and complete. No matter how intelligent a developer may be, its almost impossible to remember a single function within a piece of software that likely contains thousands upon thousands of lines of code. This is also why its so important to maintain source code structure during the development process.

No one want’s to jump into what the industry refers to as spaghetti code because you can easily spend more time debugging and deciphering the process than you would by modifying the flow to bypass an existing integration. Granted, the latter option is not always desired, it may be the only option given the budget of the project.

Can it Ever Be Completely Avoided?

Ah, that’s a tricky question as well. No matter how cautious you are, its important to keep in mind that the underlying operating systems and browsers utilized by computers are constantly changing. We can complete all of the due diligence upfront but we cannot guarantee that something may not change with something outside of our control. This isn’t just something that affects us. Every now and then, a major change will be made with a component that will result in breaking changes. The most common cause of these breaking changes result from changes in security recommendations. As computers grow more and more powerful, previously secure systems are becoming vulnerable. As a result, you can’t just not upgrade the underlying systems unless you want to expose your systems to a potentially worse situation that could involve a data breach or other malicious action. Aside from the security implications, you also have to deal with changes that are made to improve functionality to an existing feature or to add a new feature to the product.

Conclusion

We minimize the mitigation involved with this possibility by employing the methods mentioned above during architecture planning overview, but fortunately for us, our competitors do not always follow suit. Even though what we do is create software, our primary focus is helping our clients succeed and its never fun to point fingers to a previous provider that didn’t deliver the best product possible through no fault of the client.

Ensuring a project’s success is a culmination of many aspects so while we don’t mean to diminish those concerns, we do have to highlight how important it is to place the right focus at the right time to ensure that everything runs smoothly. We’ve definitely dealt with our fair share of poor architecture decisions and spaghetti code from other vendors, but we’ve been fortunate to able to acquire a knack for it over the years. If this happens to be one of the current issues plaguing your business, then feel free to reach out to us and let’s see how we can get everything back on track.