In the event that you are a business owner then there would have been times when you would have faced technical debts in your company. It is important for you to repay the debts as early as you can. In this article, you will learn about what technical debts are and why you incur them at all.
Technical debt is basically the extra work that requires to be done to complete development of software. However, this notion will not refer only to those projects which are being developed currently. This issue will often follow those projects which have been under production for a long time also. This can be anything from a module that was written on legacy technology and will hold the project from reaching completion to including certain new functionalities that can influence the stability of the software. In specific instances, technical debts will get calculated as being the time and the money that is required for refactoring the code of that module in order to port it on the newer technology. However, usually, it will not be that easy as the system of the software will include certain drawbacks which will get included within the project’s technical debts also.
If you do not address such debts as early as you can, then you would go into acquiring more debts later on in your future. This will result in getting a poor performance of your software. It can also become impossible for you to change your software and will risk your software from breaking after getting updates. You must manage your technical debts during the earlier stages of your development.
Using the term “debt” will be basically a reference to the financial world and similar to the financial debts, the technical debts will also generate interest when they do not get resolved quickly. Thus, technical debt will give way for newer technical debts to become accumulated, and that will cost your business and your software development team a lot in the future.
What can cause a Technical Debt?
In order to address technical debts in a better way, it is necessary for you first to understand what will have caused them first. There are four basic reasons as to why you might get a technical debt:
- Poor Conceptions – When a certain application is being developed, then the speed with which your company will be able to deliver your products will be making quite an impact. The reason for this is that any software gets developed in order to answer and solve particular problems and address some particular challenges within a time limit. It will be important for you to make the software when its need is being felt. In a rush to deliver quick results, we will often see companies rolling out software which is not designed properly. The product or the software will not be properly designed and thought out. The prime focus given in its development will be in making the different functionalities of the product good. There will be at times an agreement made during the start of the project about launching the features first and the time allocated in them would also lessen the time required to market the products.
- Poor Scheduling of the software – Underestimating while the software is being developed can also cause the rise of technical debts. The focus of the developmental team will be to respect the estimated time frames. This will result in the accumulation of several bad practices which they will all have to finally and ultimately even pay for.
- Certain Bad Development Practice being used – It will be vital that your development team makes use of certain practices and proper conventions in order to ensure that little and almost no significant differences in designs and implementations arise from different features. There will be a lack in the development of good practices and the conventions will be leading the developers to implement their designs and rebuilding their same logic every time and then format the code they have in any way that they would want instead of doing it in the way that will be accepted commonly in a specific software project.
- Outdated Technologies – With the further evolution of technology, the standards of software will become higher with each passing day. After the development of new improvements, you can see newer technical debts arising again.
What are some common Types of Technical Debts?
Now that you have learned about the reasons why technical debts arise in the first place, it will be important for you to know about the types of technical debts that you can incur. This can help you in estimating the time that you will require to solve these issues.
- Source Code Format – This is a common, yet fortunately, the easy problem as it is quite easy to fix. You need to use the correct tools and templates during and also before starting your development project as it will reduce your technical debt by a large margin.
- Low Testing Coverage – It is vital to do testing of your software before launching it, and in the test coverage you will basically measure your code’s quality. The tests shall ensure that the various parts of your codes will behave in the manner that you would want it to. Low testing coverage will lower the accuracy probability of your software, and as a result, it will be difficult to work the problems out if they occur.
- Low Modularity – This will generally result from having a poorly coded design. There are some codes which serve multiple business logic. When developers write more codes, then there is more lack of modularity.
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Hopefully, the information mentioned in this article will have helped you.
