How to Identify and Reduce Your Technical Debt

Much like financial debt, technical debt accumulates over time and can lead to serious consequences if left unaddressed. But do you know what exactly causes this debt, and how can development teams effectively manage it?

Technical debt arises when teams make quick decisions to deliver a project faster, often at the cost of code quality. Initially, these choices appear effective, usually when you have quick deadlines or project requirements are changed. However, over time, they can create issues that slow development and make codebase maintenance hard.

High technical debt makes it difficult and expensive for teams to add new features, fix bugs, and maintain existing parts of the app. According to McKinsey, a startling 30% of firms allocate over 20% of their budgets to fight the negative effects of this technical debt. This number serves as a wake-up call for all struggling to survive in the tech industry. 

In this write-up, we will explain what causes technical debt and a few effective measures to avoid it in your next project.

What Causes Technical Debt?

Technical debt often arises when developers take shortcuts to complete a project quickly. This can lead to messy code that is harder to maintain. The longer you let it grow, the more it can hold a team back. Whether you’re a solo developer or part of a large software team, managing this tech technical debt effectively is important before it becomes a bigger issue. Here are some common factors that can pile it up:

• Poor Documentation: Inappropriate documentation of software code, architecture, and design decisions is among the primary reasons for organizations’ high technical debt.
• Insufficient Testing: When teams do not allocate sufficient time for testing, they may overlook quality issues that become costly to fix later.
• Outdated Technology: Today’s software houses still rely on legacy systems, frameworks, libraries, or infrastructure that can contribute to their technical debt. 
• Siloed Development: When different teams or individuals work in isolation without coordinating on shared goals, it can lead to duplicated efforts and inefficient solutions that add to technical debt.
• Organizational Factors: Issues like limited budgets, lack of development skills, or misaligned incentives may all be the reasons behind the debt ratio’s rise.
• Feature Creep: Adding extra features without refactoring the underlying design will make your product codebase difficult to preserve and possibly cause debt. 
• Lack of Refactoring: Not maintaining regular code reviews and updates for better code structure and readability can cause technical debt to pile up.

How to Handle Your Technical Debt

Technical debt is an unavoidable part of the software development process, but it can be balanced with the right approach. As a leading software development company, our ability to efficiently manage technical debt is what sets us apart from others. Here are a few effective measures below to help you save time and resources. 

1. Define, Identify, and Measure Technical Debt

To handle technical debt effectively, start by thoroughly analyzing your codebase to find problem areas. This means carefully checking your code, design, and development practices to spot any shortcuts or less-than-ideal solutions that were used in the past.

Carnegie Mellon University found that even when teams understand why technical debt builds up, they often struggle to manage it. In fact, 65% of the time, they are not in a good position to address it. So, just finding the problems isn’t enough.

Once you have identified the areas of improvement, the next step is to evaluate how much impact each issue has, how long it will take to fix them, and what are possible the risks of not addressing it. This will prioritize the most crucial issue first and ensure that your resources are used effectively.

2. Automate Wherever Possible

Artificial intelligence in software development has become an essential requirement as it performs accurately and flawlessly without human intervention. AI tools can help in various stages of development, such as prototyping, coding, and testing. They make it easier for teams to spot areas where code needs improvement and identify issues like coding standard violations. Here’s how AI can help:

• Automated Code Reviews: AI tools scan your code and give specific advice to improve it and reduce your technical debt.
• Predictive Maintenance: These intelligent models predict where technical debt might grow in the future so that focus that early before it escalates.
• Smart Code Optimization: AI suggests changes to improve your code’s performance and maintainability.
• Automated Documentation: AI helps you properly manage your software documentation, sharing knowledge more easily and avoiding information gaps.

3. Refactor Strategically

Refactoring involves restructuring legacy code without changing its external behavior, making it easier to maintain, understand, and grow. It’s among the effective ways to reduce technical debt with steps including: 

• Identify Debt
• Prioritize Debt
• Refactor Systematically
• Improve Code Quality
• Adopt Best Practices
• Automate Testing
• Monitor and Improve

You can make quick fixes or temporary workarounds, but they may be a short-term relief. Instead, I advise spending more time refactoring to ensure the code remains maintainable and sustainable in the long term. 

Zohaib Ali (Tech Expert at Cubix) 

4. Technology Upgrades

It is vital to periodically assess your software stack and ensure updates to sidestep the rising technical debt that may arise from old technologies. In fact, 81% of software cannot work with advanced technologies due to the hurdle of huge debt over them. If you want to get rid of this debt, you must review your current stack and plan timely upgrades. There are several assessment areas that you can go for, including:

• Current technologies and their lifecycles. 
• Research and evaluate newer & efficient alternatives. 
• Develop an upgrade plan and prioritize critical ones. 
• Allocate resources and a healthy budget. 
• Train your team for a robust change in development.

5. Avoiding Over-Engineering

Clean code is easier to read and maintain, which can significantly reduce the time spent on debugging and fixing issues. According to Boomberbot, developers worldwide spend about 50% of their time understanding code rather than writing it. While writing maintainable code is crucial, avoiding complications within software development solutions is essential. It can lead to unnecessary complexity and potential code debt for organizations. 

Over-engineering usually becomes an issue when teams create overly complex or feature-rich solutions that do not provide immediate value to the current business needs. The result after this will always be disappointing, with difficulty and a surge in this debt.

Ready to Manage technical debt? Start with Cubix

Effective technical debt management is not a one-time effort. It demands a consistent commitment to preserve a healthy codebase. In fact, 82% of developers globally believe that technical debt in their legacy systems holds back their ability to improve or upgrade them. At Cubix, we follow best practices to keep code clean and development practices strong to avoid new debt and address existing issues. 

It helps us identify potential code debt early so that we can put more effort into innovation and creativity in our development solutions. Are you tired of fighting a battle against your ending technical debt? Contact us now for High-end software development solutions.