By IT Brew Staff
less than 3 min read
Definition:
During software development, developers and other IT professionals may take coding shortcuts to meet deadlines and deliver a finished product, or make poor decisions to speed up development or satisfy business objectives. Over time, these choices lead to technical debt, or a future need to refactor, debug, or otherwise fix the codebase.
Not all technical debt is avoidable; sometimes developers have an unmovable deadline or too few resources to do things right. Developers early in their careers may also build up technical debt on their current project without even realizing it; they need a more experienced IT pro to show them a more efficient way to code. Poor team communication, a lack of testing, and changing requirements can likewise force organizations into ever-increasing amounts of debt.
Identifying and solving technical debt as early as possible can save incredible amounts of time and effort later. To that end, some teams may engage in:
- Regular code reviews. Everyone can help identify where the code has grown too complex. Specialized analytics tools that offer code quality metrics can help with this.
- Developer feedback. The IT pros buried in the code every day can quickly identify the most problematic areas.
- Performance monitoring. If tools and apps aren’t performing as intended, technical debt might be to blame.
- Prioritize technical debt elimination. Reserving a set percentage of a development cycle to tackle technical debt, and integrating code reviews into regular workflows, can help teams stay on top of their debt.
Over the long term, IT teams should make a point of attempting to modularize their IT architecture; by breaking monolithic systems into discrete components, developers can debug and refactor code without worrying excessively about system-wide disruptions. Modular components can also be outright swapped out for newer ones. Educating IT teams about the consequences of excessive technical debt is also important, as it may lead developers to pay more attention to their code—and save themselves a lot of aggravation down the proverbial road.
