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“Technical debt is more than a bottleneck. It’s an unseen cost that undermines agility and innovation,” says Vincent Delaroche, the founder and CEO of CAST.
The line between speed and stability in any custom development project is thin.
Let’s explain. Developers often cut corners while delivering projects. They avoid deep testing, hardcoding logic, and take a route that speeds the software development process. Result? Quality gets thrown off, and technical debt mounts.
Like any other form of debt, technical debt needs to be paid back. And, in a typical software setting, technical debt can be reduced by adhering to a few unbeatable measures.
ET Telecom reports that, according to McKinsey, technical debt from old software and inefficient code is costing the global economy more than $1.3 trillion a year.
This blog explains those and a lot more, so that business owners like you can have the peace of mind.
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Technical debt, commonly referred to as code debt, is the cost of taking shortcuts to align with the custom software development process. Taking these shortcuts is like losing a piece of a puzzle: in the end, everything falls apart. It results in less efficient, harder-to-maintain code that needs additional efforts to fix.
Consider financial loan in this case. You avail the loan to meet urgent needs. But you have to pay it back eventually, and with interest.
Quite similar to that of a financial loan, even technical debt needs to be paid off. And there is a price to pay as well. While code debt enables faster delivery of a project, it incurs hefty costs in the future, like increased complexity, reduced code quality, and additional time spent on rework and maintenance.
Technical debt can fall into several categories. Some of them are:
Understanding and knowing how to recognize the technical debt categories will help you point out and implement the right techniques to reduce them.
Technical debt doesn’t occur in a day; it builds over time. It happens due to weak planning, changes in market dynamics and requirements, and tighter deadlines. Some of the common causes of technical debt in software projects include –
One of the greatest challenges faced by most developers is time restrictions and launch pressures. To tackle such scenarios, most development teams choose speed and quantity over quality. They skip crucial steps like testing, code reviews, documentation, feedback, etc.
Taking such shortcuts leads to poor implementation, which further need continuous revisits and overhauls. With time, the need for reiterations to fix these quick solutions increases, leading to a mountain of technical debt.
Continuous improvements and vigorous changes are the part and parcel of agile methodologies. But the flexibility of this approach can be a double-edged sword. When developers invest in new feature development without fixing the codebase’s base structure, it leads to software with a fragile foundation.
Here, the code becomes demanding, duplicate logic starts creeping in, and integrations become unmanageable, and by avoiding scheduled refactoring to deal with upcoming changes, the complexity increases drastically.
Documentation often takes a backseat when timelines are tight. But when source code lacks context or explanation, it becomes a black box for new team members. This not only slows down onboarding but also introduces risk—developers may unknowingly break functionality when attempting changes. Lack of documentation also makes it difficult to scale teams, debug issues efficiently, or repurpose existing code.
Though relying on traditional libraries and frameworks offers short-term benefits, they soon transform into a liability. As time passes, these legacy tools fail to adapt to new and updated security patches, resulting in compatibility and performance bottlenecks. Later, updating such technologies becomes a complicated and high-risk effort that disturbs the current projects and misuses resources.
While supporting junior developers is a corporate ethic and also brings fresh perspectives to the table, leaving them unsupervised can lead to poor design decisions and development bottlenecks. These include things like poor naming conventions, over-engineered solutions, or redundant logic.
Without proper supervision or code reviews, these errors pile up to increase inefficiencies in the system. With time, it affects scalability, maintainability, and overall software performance.
Rigorous testing is the safety net for software development. To move faster, most teams avoid automated software testing or integration testing, making it harder to implement changes in the future. Besides, being afraid of regressions, developers tend to become skeptical about modifying the codebase. This delays innovation, and the risk of bugs getting undetected increases, causing roadblocks in production. Adequate testing builds confidence and promotes continuous improvement.
Technical debt reduction isn’t just an option; it’s a business imperative. Here is why it is of the essence –
Avoiding technical debt is like promoting a leak in your ship that lets it sink. Eventually, your system’s fragility would grow, making it difficult to navigate debt effectively.
Minimizing technical debt needs a blend of technical discipline and business buy-in. Here are some proven debt management strategies that can be of help:
Routine code reviews allow for mistakes and inefficiencies to be recognized early. In addition, it also aids in establishing consistency in clean code principles. Pair programming (two developers working together on the same code) for the same reasons will also encourage knowledge sharing, improve code quality, and provide different points of view on a problem. In addition, they will also counterbalance the propensity to take shortcuts and will lead to more thorough design thinking.
Plan a specific time during your sprint cycles to clean up the code you have already written. These ‘refactoring sprints’ are allocated periods of time within the sprint cycles to reduce redundancy, reduce complexity, improve the naming, and enhance the structure of your code already written. Refactoring sprints are a way to manage code quality upfront so that you do not have to halt the software development activity altogether.
A well-established automated software testing strategy is a prerequisite to refactoring with confidence and guaranteeing future-proofing. You would want to utilize unit tests at the function level, integration tests on how a system interacts with other systems, and end-to-end tests to establish concrete user journeys for your clients. With automated testing frameworks like Jest, JUnit, and Selenium, you can be assured of refactoring or enhancing your code, and that nothing will break unexpectedly.
Tools like SonarQube, ESLint, and PMD offer a huge benefit by providing community-based automated insight into the software code quality. They highlight issues like code smells, duplicated code, excessive cyclomatic complexity, and violations of best practices. These tools are like a second set of eyes, finding problems before they become major issues.
Consider technical debt items to be first-class citizens in your backlog. These items, like new features, should be estimated, prioritized, and tracked. Assign story points (if appropriate) and consider how these items will also impact velocity for future work. There are many tools (like Jira and Azure DevOps) that will let you label your tasks and also categorize debt-related utility tasks so that they are visible, and you can measure them when looking at your backlog planning.
The tools and practices of software development are always evolving. Providing automation developers with continuing education and training (online courses, workshops, or conferences) allows them to keep up with contemporary patterns, practices, tools, and security approaches. A well-educated team will be in a better position to avoid and remediate technical debt in the first place.
Not every instance of technical debt in custom software needs to be resolved immediately. Instead of striving to achieve theoretical perfection, strive for practical perfection. Pay attention to debt that represents a risk to performance, scalability, or security. Over-engineering wastes time, but it can also add unnecessary complications that, in themselves, can become a form of debt.
Following the above practices can help you manage and reduce technical debt, ensuring better software development for your business.
Architecture reviews and code audits are essential factors of a custom software process. They are valuable for their ability to identify design and implementation flaws before they become larger issues.
Conducted by senior engineers or architects with proven architectural experience, architectural reviews examine the high-level structural elements of an application. The review’s intent is to prescribe modularity, separation of concerns, and adaptability to future change. Architecture reviews help assess the risks of tightly coupled systems, bottlenecks that become resolved in unsatisfactory ways later, issues with scalability, and many others. While architecture reviews can happen at any point, implementation should occur as part of key timelines as a project develops: pre-release phases or when changing to a new stack are common places for architecture reviews.
Architecture reviews address two major considerations: structural and non-functional architecture. Non-functional architecture brings items like performance, security, maintainability, etc., to the table. For example, evaluating how a microservices architecture may affect inter-service communication helps avoid latency pitfalls later on. Similarly, looking at the database choice, caching strategy, etc., will save teams from large-scale rewriting later in the project.
A code audit consists of a complete investigation into your software code quality, security, and maintainability. An internal audit will ensure your code is written to your company’s coding standards, whereas an external audit will determine the validity of your assumptions by providing an objective assessment. The audits look at code searching for blind spots, bad practices, or habits we subconsciously adopt as a development team. Auditing can intervene and support any repetitive practices, it will identify opportunities for refactoring, and ensure that critical paths are stable and secure.
Not all audits are necessarily simply providing syntax checks these days, our audits will ensure your code conforms to SOLID compliance, assess any modules’ testability, discover vulnerabilities in your code, and check security practices, ie, the right methods to handling input and data sanitation. There are also audit tools to consider, like Checkmarx or Fortify. These tools can help automate some of the tasks and understand a baseline of activity, to ensure the health of your code is consistently monitored.
When used as part of the development lifecycle, both architecture reviews and code audits will mitigate the potential for compounding debt, enhance accountability, and help build a sustainable foundation for growth. Over time, they create a culture of engineering excellence.
Agile and DevOps practices fundamentally reshape how technical debt is handled by embedding feedback loops and automation into the development process.
Agile teams operate in relatively short sprints so that they can adapt and rework often. The opportunity to rework an Agile project is considered one of the greatest strengths of Agile methodology. Just as retrospectives identify what is and isn’t working, there is often code and/or processes that need improvement. Technical debt can be explicitly added to the backlog and discussed during grooming sessions, ensuring it’s not ignored. Agile promotes cross-functionality, which can result in Agile teams working in integrated ways with one another, creating more simplicity in the movement toward refactoring and more effectiveness in developing a better process.
Additionally, Agile emphasizes incremental delivery and customer feedback. This takes the pressure off developers to respond to problems quickly without creating ambiguity beyond a short-term fix. Technical debt becomes an acceptable by-product of agile workflows, not a hidden risk. Additionally, methods like Test-Driven Development (TDD) or Continuous Refactoring play well with Agile and allow teams to consistently pay down debt.
DevOps has automation, monitoring, and continuous feedback. CI/CD allows for smaller and faster deployments, which are easier to tune and correct. CI/CD pipelines have automated testing, linters, and performance checks that lessen the chance that debt gets inadvertently created. Practices such as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) lessen human errors created through manual setups, and configuration management tools can work to create consistent environments.
DevOps also allows for technical debt reduction by providing visibility into application quality. Real-time metrics on performance, uptime, and errors can provide teams with insight when debt-related issues are affecting the users. Automated rollback mechanisms lessen the fear of releasing changes, encouraging experimentation and iterative improvement.
Agile and DevOps fuel a more mindful approach to software development with smaller changes, lower risk, and higher quality code. Both Agile and DevOps practices work to minimize the chances of creating unmanageable technical debt while allowing teams to pay it down early.
Technical debt is not what we see every day or is readily visible, especially when a software seems to work just fine. But under the surface, outdated libraries, poor code quality, and shortcuts can wreak havoc, silently killing your project, increasing maintenance costs, and reducing scalability opportunities.
To identify and measure technical debt, consider the following steps –
Use the formula: TDR = Remediation Cost/Development Cost to get an idea of how much rework is needed in your current project.
Calculate your code churn and rework time to measure technical debt. If your developers are spending more time rewriting or reworking code than developing, it’s evident that you are accumulating debt.
A low sprint velocity or higher defect counts indicate issues in your system and debt accumulation.
Maintaining a proper balance between new feature development and debt reduction is crucial for project health. Often, overprioritizing features can leave development teams with unmanageable technical debt. Similarly, just focusing on cleaning up will affect innovation.
Here are some ways to maintain balance between development and debt reduction –
Dedicate a consistent percentage in every sprint (say around 15% to 20%) to technical debt reduction and bundle it as part of your process so it can be sustainable and not disruptive.
Not all technical debt is an emergency. Consider putting your attention towards technical debt that highly impacts performance, security, and developer efficiency.
When building features, identify and remove any immediate technical debt in and around the feature. This will allow change to be constant, sustainable, and without hindrances to systems.
Use analogies with non-technical financial decision makers by saying, “Software maintenance is like servicing a car,” so they understand why they should view technical debt reduction as a long-term investment.
Maintain a backlog of technical debt items with equal visibility and priority, and treat them as you would do with a feature request.
Technical debt can swamp internal teams, especially those focusing on product delivery. In such scenarios, outsourcing is a remarkable option for technical debt reduction! Outsourcing frees up your in-house developers from redundant jobs, allowing them to concentrate on innovation while an outsourced specialist addresses your technical debt and optimizes your software.
When your team does not possess the needed knowledge or architectural or DevOps skills to resolve complex technical debt, bringing in external consultants here can provide specialized technical know-how.
Taking the time to clean up or refactor legacy systems is difficult and risky. Dedicating another team familiar with legacy code to assist with the modernization process can alleviate risk and provide the needed velocity in dealing with it.
When dealing with substantial technical debt that is impacting the velocity of your ability to release new features, leveraging external teams can help reduce the number of blockers without having to pause feature development.
Third-party teams can provide objective reporting and assessments, allowing you to identify technical debt.
Outsourcing your technical debt work to a custom software development company that specializes in optimization may help you avoid the expense of hiring and onboarding a new full-time resource.
Planning to outsource custom software development services to reduce technical debt?
With around 15 years of experience, Unified Infotech is the top choice for custom software development solutions, helping businesses develop faster and smarter.
Technical debt is just a part of the development process, but it doesn’t have to be harmful. Just like you wouldn’t want to rack up too much financial debt, technical debt, if ignored for too long, can become harmful, or become the reason behind the detriment of you, your team, and your customers.
Technical debt management is about awareness, planning, responsibility, and a structured repayment process. For all organizations relying on custom software solutions, technical debt manifests itself in faster releases, secure systems, improved user experience, and happy developers. Ways to invest in your technical debt management strategy include, but are not limited to, agile technical sprints, architecture or technical review, DevOps and automation, code audits, etc. All of which will enable teams to build better, not just faster.
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"Sayantan Roy is the Senior Solution Architect at Unified Infotech. He ensures every project achieves optimal performance and functionality. Being the visionary architect behind complex and innovative solutions, Sayantan meets client needs precisely.”
Technical debt can significantly impact both speed and growth potential in the custom software development process. When developers take the easy route, commonly due to restricted project deadlines and a lack of foresight, software becomes less performant and scalable.
The net result is that technical debt is not just a developer concern; it fundamentally impacts business agility and ultimately the user experience.
If you don't take care of technical debt, it will compound into bigger problems down the line. The longer you ignore it, the more expensive and risky it becomes.
Key Implications:
In short, letting technical debt go unchecked will stifle innovation, drive up costs, and decrease the long-term viability of your software.
You can’t get rid of technical debt altogether, but you can make your problems manageable. Here’s how to do that -
Taking some of these steps during development may save time remediating issues and help support a scalable solution.
Code quality is a defense against technical debt. When code is clean and maintainable, issues generally do not accumulate,
Note: Keeping code quality in mind as you develop is not just a technical decision; it’s a large strategic investment in the lifecycle of your product.
Dealing with your technical debt must be a systematic and ongoing process. You are not really “paying off” the debt; instead, you are achieving sustainable debt management.
Here are the steps to develop a management plan:
It shouldn't become a large blocker if you can maintain and actively manage your technical debt. With proactive technical debt management, teams can keep innovating without fear of breaking the system.
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