Technical Debt Continues To Mount – Here’s How To Solve It
Technical debt is a significant problem in software development, costing $2.4 trillion annually and taking up to 42% of developers’ time. The compromise that often gets made between short-term efficiency and long-term sustainability results in the sacrifice of code quality so that companies can get projects out the door quicker.
It’s a problem that must be stamped out to prevent it from growing into a mountain that looks too high to climb. By doing so, organizations can be better positioned to minimize technical debt and prevent it from compounding.
What Is Tech Debt?
Technical debt is the invisible price tag attached to decisions made on the fly during the development process. Developers experience greater pressure than ever to deliver, and driven by mounting expectations to write more and more code, split-second decision-making happens that often results in poor-quality code.
Like the fiscal version of the term, tech debt accrues “interest” over time. As a result, companies produce more complex, less flexible, low-quality code. This complicates the development process and introduces challenges to developer teams that slow down work. Not only that, but it can make it difficult for teams to figure out how they can even move forward with the code or project.
In short: Tech debt is a problem no software development team, or company, wants to deal with.
How Does Tech Debt Limit Speed?
While tech debt accrues as teams attempt to speed up the development process, in actuality, the opposite happens. Think of running through a maze blindfolded: You can get off to a good start, but at some point, you’re going to hit a wall. Developers find themselves having to navigate a labyrinth of their own making thanks to tech debt — they have to slow down to fix or make sense of bad code. This impedes projects; timelines are stretched and deadlines may be missed altogether. Developer teams are saddled with the resulting migraine.
Accumulating tech debt grinds the development process to a halt when it should be operating smoothly. Due to webs of convoluted code, developers have to spend valuable time deciphering undocumented logic, untangling messes of code and patching hastily implemented features. All of this is inefficient and causes delays, creating deep frustration for developers. The more tech debt compounds, the less velocity developers have, which means productivity and morale take a massive hit.
What Does Tech Debt Do to Code Quality?
The detrimental effect of technical debt on developer velocity is bad enough, but it also generates significant challenges for maintaining code quality. When code is written poorly, not structured well and doesn’t include proper documentation, it’s more likely to be riddled with bugs, vulnerabilities and maintenance headaches. This results in a codebase that becomes fragile, and possibly unstable.
These codebases are difficult for developers to maintain, extend or refactor, which only exacerbates these code issues. Developers scramble to handle fire drill after fire drill to address problems rather than focusing on new features or enhanced functionality. This vicious cycle stifles innovation and undermines confidence in software’s reliability and robustness, which can be detrimental to business.
So, What’s the Solution?
Despite challenges that can feel insurmountable, there is a way to mitigate damage: the clean as you code approach.
This methodology emphasizes that software developers constantly monitor and test their code as they write it, ensuring they’re taking care of any small problems that can potentially grow to become larger, more difficult ones down the line. Preventing future tech debt accumulation is critical in both being able to solve current issues and keep up with development demands — which won’t slow down anytime soon.
Pairing the methodology with automated solutions that seamlessly integrate into the DevOps workflow allows developers to ensure end-to-end quality, helping them both manage existing tech debt and prevent future accumulation.
Automated code review tools help teams quickly identify and correct issues, vulnerabilities and bugs early on in the coding process. This drastically curtails the potential for future tech debt while ensuring teams don’t have to take extensive time away from their higher-impact work later on in the development process to instead mitigate code issues.
These practices, solutions and overall mindset provide development teams with the power to maintain consistent code quality throughout the CI/CD pipeline. They foster a culture of clean code and continuous improvement that not only streamlines workflows but provides stakeholders with the insight they need to make informed decisions and reduce the expensive problem of technical debt.
Final Thoughts
Only by acknowledging this growing, expensive problem and taking action to prevent it will organizations be able to create high-quality software. By adopting a “clean as you code” approach and pairing it with the right solutions, developers can empower themselves to create quality software with longevity that brings value to their business. Check out the automated code review tools from Sonar: SonarLint, SonarQube and SonarCloud.
