Manage and reduce technical debt

Manage and reduce technical debt 

We often write about technical debt. That’s because it’s an issue for many companies – large and small. Of course, the bigger your company, the more likely you are to have considerable technical debt – particularly if you have grown by merger or acquisition, where many IT systems come together.  

Similarly, if you have an internal development team, time and cost pressures can also create technical debt. Whatever the type and level of technical debt in your business, you need to be able to both manage and reduce it to create the operational and financial efficiencies you need. 

Recognising your technical debt 

Of course, you can’t manage your debt if you don’t know it exists. So the first step is to understand the different types of technical debt, and recognise how each type of debt has occurred. You can find out more about this in our article, Recognising Technical Debt. 

Once you have understood the technical debt in your organisation, there are some important steps to take. 

Create a Debt Register 

Just as you would create a risk register, a technical debt register will help you to catalogue your debt, and note your progress in managing each one. Your register doesn’t need to be complicated – you need just four or five fields: 

Description – what is the debt and which part of the business is it in? 

Impact – what impact does this debt have on the business? This should be both current and future. 

The fix – how can this issue be fixed? Can you do this with internal resources or do you need external support? 

The cost – what is the cost of fixing the debt? This includes both direct resources, and any downtime or other impacts on the business. 

Priority – where does this individual technical debt sit in your priorities?  

You’ll need to work with people across the business to build an accurate register. This will give you a good starting point – and remember that you may need to update it as and when new technical debt issues are discovered. 

Prioritise wisely 

Understanding how to manage the prioritisation of your technical debt is fundamental to successfully managing and reducing your technical debt. The inherent danger is that you look for the quickest wins – but in many cases, the pressure to deliver quickly has caused the problem in the first place. 

Instead, you need to take the time to balance the long-term quality of your technical debt fixes with the ability to get them fixed sooner rather than later. In practice, this means understanding the resources you will need in order to manage the debt, including test-driven development, regular reviews and understanding how the systems in your business interact with each other. 

Technical debt management in practice 

The way you manage your debt will depend on your resources. If you have a dedicated development team, you’ll need to be able to incorporate your technical debt plans into their existing workload. 

This might mean getting results more slowly than you would like, but unless you have the resources to hive off a dedicated team to work on this, it’s probably the most reliable way to address your problems. 

For larger debt issues, or those where downtime needs to be minimised, you could dedicate some sprint time to specific areas. You could also implement a process where debt is managed as it’s discovered – it will need to be added to your project plan, but you will be able to see the impact of fixing the debt on the rest of the system. 

If you don’t have a large development team to hand, you may want to outsource some or all of the management issues. This might mean bringing people into your business on a contractor basis, so they can immerse themselves in the issues, or you may want to send out a specific project to a team you trust. 

Measuring your progress 

Use your debt register to measure your progress using agreed KPIs. Metrics such as code complexity, code churn, and bug frequency can indicate the state of technical debt in the system. Tools like static code analysers can be used to highlight code smells, duplicated code, and overly complex functions that may signal debt. By tracking these metrics over time, teams can see the impact of their efforts and ensure that debt is being systematically reduced. 

Reducing technical debt 

All the above processes, designed to manage technical debt, can also be used to reduce it in the long term. Having a top-level awareness of the opportunity for technical debt, plus a register to manage and mitigate the debt, and developing a culture of technical debt fixing and management in your teams should mean that you have a better focus on the problem, and a proven way to deal with it. 

At ISB Smart Solutions, we help businesses improve their systems by using low code development, which is less likely to create technical debt in the first place. As a proud partner of OutSystems, one of the world’s leading low code platforms, we can show you exactly how this approach can help your business to become more efficient. 

Contact us to find out more.