Pay back time… tech debt is business debt!

Your technical debt is product debt and product debt is business debt! Start giving your technical debt the attention it deserves or it will punish you later. Technical debt is business debt, the funds are just not borrowed from a bank but taken from engineers. This sounds provokative? Read further because tech debt is business debt!

What is technical debt?

The term was coined by Ward Cunningham, who said “If we failed to make our program align with what we then understood to be the proper way to think about our financial objects, then we were going to continue to stumble on that disagreement which is like paying interest on a loan.”.

Further he added “Shipping first-time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with refactoring. The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on code that is not quite right for the programming task of the moment counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unfactored implementation, object-oriented or otherwise.”.

Tech debt is business debt!

Technical debt is a real problem for your business because it can cause problems with your software. This in turn affects the quality of the service or product you provide to customers and ultimately impacts on revenue.
The longer technical debt goes unaddressed, the more expensive it becomes to fix later down the line as new features are added or existing ones need updating. Obviously there’s less time available for development work!

This also has an impact on customer satisfaction levels because they may not be getting what they want when they expect it from you as a business partners. In addition, if bugs aren’t fixed quickly enough then these will have knock-on effects. You will see increased support costs due to unhappy users who don’t understand why things haven’t been done properly. All of this leads directly back into lost revenues.

How to tackle technical debt ?

The best way you tackle technical debt is by addressing it as soon as possible. The longer this goes on without being addressed the more expensive it becomes. Remember, we are talking about business debt here and it’s important that the priorities are set accordingly on business and product level. As mentioned technical debt is not necessarily caused by bad design or poor coding skill. Business and product priorities of the past might have caused it.

Key to making good decisions on all level is having high degree of alignment and context across business, product and engineers. Therefore good and frequent communication is essential, ideally face to face instead of email. In other terms, pay back your debt before interest gets too high!

If you want to read more about technical debt: Managing Technical Debt: Reducing Friction in Software Development (SEI Series in Software Engineering)