“Technical debt” has become a widely used term in the software industry. However, identifying what technical debt really means varies from person to person. Some software leaders even question whether the concept of technical debt still has usefulness. No matter what terminology you use, it’s clear that managing technical debt is a reality software teams must confront.
Let’s look at a few key insights on how your software company can “refinance” your technical debt to accelerate software development.
What Does Technical Debt Mean?
Technical debt often rears its head when someone at a company requests a small, new feature to be added to an application, and the software team says, “It’s going to take a month.”
Executives, sales, and marketing people might wonder, “Why does it take so long to add some small feature? It’s just a text box.” The answer often gets reduced to “technical debt.”
Technical debt can include:
- Aging technology that is no longer supported and doesn’t run on newer machines or operating systems
- Unnecessarily complex and difficult-to-debug code
- Old, often undocumented code that few developers understand and fear modifying
- Systems or components originally designed for different purposes retrofitted for new capabilities
- Tightly-coupled, obtuse, and highly intertwined code – typical spaghetti that’s grown over the years through an ever-increasing series of band-aids
- Clunky and old-looking apps that need updates to deliver the more modern user experience that customers expect
In all of these situations, even adding a simple feature requires additional effort and undue risk to compensate for the technical debt.
Tech Debt: It’s Not Always a Bad Thing
Technical debt is an unavoidable byproduct of software development. It’s a cost of innovation as software evolves. You’re acquiring technical debt from Day One, and your tech debt will never be zero.
One basic example of how technical debt happens is in the source code. As software developers write code, they’re learning and improving and creating better code (one hopes). That means older code is often less efficient, more buggy, and harder to maintain—this is a natural byproduct of learning and growth. Source code might also have been written to solve an earlier problem or constraint that’s no longer relevant. Updating and fixing this outdated code can be a big driver of tech debt.
How much tech debt is “too much?” Technical debt is a problem if it is getting in the way of delivering value for your customers and driving revenue for the business. Let’s say it takes two weeks to add a text box to a screen that’s going to bring in $5 million of revenue to the company. In that case, the technical debt is not that big of a deal. But if it’s taking you two weeks to generate $1,000, that’s when you should be concerned that your tech debt is hurting the business.
One of the highest-risk forms of technical debt is structural debt, related to how the software architecture is designed. Your software engineers and software architects need to design the system to be modular and flexible instead of monolithic. If it’s not, instead of just lighting up a new user experience or altering centralized business logic, you might just end up paying to build the whole thing over again. This type of technical debt can result in astronomical costs.
To avoid the worst-case scenarios of technical debt, it’s important to be disciplined and deliberate about software product design and architecture—not just on paper, but actually in practice. Build your system to last. Without a strong foundation, you’ll end up building on sand, and will inevitably sacrifice stability, scalability, security, and development velocity.
Tech Debt Week: Focus on the Real Problems
Software teams have embraced the concept of “Tech Debt Week,” where software developers and engineers can focus a full week on fixing issues in the code. Tech Debt Week can be a useful exercise. But the software team needs to take an honest look at how they’re spending that time. Are you just patching holes, tackling pet projects, and writing spaghetti code that gives an illusion of solving problems? Or are you fixing the deeper structural issues?
Technical debt is more than just bad code. If your structural issues continue unchecked, they’re likely to spiral out of control and cause bigger and unnecessary risks for your business. If your software team is asking for “Tech Debt Week” every few months, that’s a bad sign.
How Modularis Helps With “Refinancing” Your Technical Debt?
Managing technical debt requires a disciplined engineering approach. It’s not good enough to apply band-aid after band-aid. And you shouldn’t have to pay lots of money to consultants to rebuild your system every five years (“NextGen” projects rarely succeed). Instead of paying high “interest rates” on your technical debt in the form of instability, high maintenance costs, and consulting fees, Modularis can help you “refinance” your technical debt to reduce costs and accelerate software development.
Modularis will work with your software team to do a Tech 360 Assessment. We’ll be the “grownups in the room” and have candid, respectful conversations with your software R&D team about how your organization can improve and what constraints are holding you back. We’ll give you unbiased feedback and a detailed action plan within 2 weeks.
At Modularis, we’re not consultants. We aren’t trying to sell you an expensive rebuild every few years. Instead, we take a disciplined engineering approach to look at the full picture of:
- How your software architecture is designed
- How you deliver value for your key customer personas
- How much time (and resources) you’re spending on maintenance instead of creating value for customers
- How you can repackage your existing assets (and their technical debt) to enable higher development velocity and lower the cost of innovation
Modularis also helps manage your technical debt by offering a new, efficient, scalable way to build and extend software products. Even if your core products are aging and monolithic, it’s often possible to pivot your R&D efforts so that new functionality is built in modern and modular technologies, while core functionality of legacy systems is contained, re-used, and repackaged. We sometimes call this “putting the spaghetti in a box.” It might not be pretty or easy to change, but if it’s solid and reliable, you can choose to innovate outside the box, without having to rewrite the solid core of your business products. What this means practically is that you can innovate faster and with less risk, time, and cost. Our PlatformPlus® solution fights technical debt by reducing hand-written code for new apps and components by 80%. Our generative, low-code platform helps de-risk and accelerate software development while making it easier to scale and update your applications along the way.
Technical debt doesn’t have to be something to fear. At its best, it’s a natural consequence of innovation. Your software team will constantly be maintaining, updating, fixing, and learning as they go. But if left unchecked, technical debt can cause big problems for your business.
Don’t get bogged down in paying interest on your technical debt. Instead, talk to Modularis. We’ll help you refinance your technical debt with a strategic software engineering mindset – and a scalable, efficient way to build software for your future growth—without forcing you to rewrite your existing products.
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