Technical debt: a time related issue

According to Wikipedia, Technical Debt refers to the eventual consequences of poor software architecture and software development within a codebase. The debt can be thought of as work that needs to be done before a particular job can be considered complete. If the debt is not repaid, then it will keep on accumulating interest, making it hard to implement changes later on. Unaddressed technical debt increases software entropy.

So, technical debt is creating a solution that is not complying to the architecture or detailed design. The reason for this is most of the time lack of time. In some circumstances, shortcuts are needed in order to deliver a project on time. This is not necessarily bad – there can be good economic, commercial or political reasons for this. Such a shortcut is known as technical debt.

Technical debt can be compared to Development without architecture, as described in the DYA architecture method. I posted an article about this some time ago. Technical debt must be “paid back”; the chosen shortcut solution must be temporarily by definition and the definitive solution – according to the architecture – must be built eventually. This means that besides the extra effort to run the solution in the suboptimal way, money must be reserved to build the definitive solution. Preferably, building the definitive solution should be started immediately – in parallel with building the technical debt.

I think technical debt can very well be extended to include infrastructure technical debt, or solution architecture technical debt for that matter. Just like technical debt can occur in software, it can be interoduced in infrastructures as well. Such technical debt can be introduced by creating an infrastructure solution that is deviating from the defined infrastructure architecture. This deviation can lead to additional cost, for instance in terms of increased systems management effort, replacing hardware before the economic life span is reached, or temporarily using additional software licenses.

Nobody likes technical debt. It is a temporary solution to a problem that needs to be solved anyway. The only real reason for creating technical debt is time constraints. If enough time is available, it is always best to create the definitive solution right away. But because of time constraints, extra money is spent creating a temporarily solution quickly, and redo it later. It must be understood by the stakeholders that by creating technical debt, they are actually paying extra for their impatience.

This entry was posted on Saturday 28 June 2014