It is true that every development project is here to receive little sacrifice but not too much that might cost the value of the project completely. In general term, technical debt is mainly a concept used in the software engineering section, to express added complexity as added to the project mainly due to technical decisions. These decisions might result in some inferior solutions being chosen as they are delivered at a rather quicker pace or rate. This form of service is mainly analogous to the area of financial debt.
You end up borrowing money for addressing some gain, incur debt but you have to pay that debt off. If you fail to do so, then the debt will start to grow with its share of interest and end up bankrupting you in the end.
Incur debt but to a certain extent:
It is okay to incur a bit of technical debt, but only hen that remains within the limitation. If you end up spending way too long just looking for those amazing solutions, then chances are high that your customers might have to move to your competitors. You will gain some value-added services and understand the notion straight from https://nationaldebtreliefprograms.com now.
- Right at the same time, in case you incur way too much of technical debt and not being able to meet the repayments, just as the internet on tech debt will compound to repayments, if you fail to meet the tech debt payments, the entropy of software starts to increase with time. Eventually, it might stagnant the product.
- At some point, this stage might take around a month to deliver, and sometimes, it can take 3 months, 6 months and more. Then, you will have just a handful of people in the whole firm who can cover it up for a period of 6 months and then will leave the compound.
Signs of bad engineering:
If you start breaking down the analog you will come to know that the idea behind technical debt is used for expressing the notion under bad engineering. Bad engineering decision will be in a different category to ones, that were made tactically with full knowledge that than of the short term priority and its worth.
- When it has been made clear that such decision will be a tactical one, it becomes way easier to convince people that refactoring needs to take place and debt is now at the time to be paid off.
- Unfortunate enough, when this term is used in a polite manner to mention bad engineering, it is unlikely that there is any repayment strategy to take place. It is even harder to create one as you have to convince people of your area of bad engineering.
- After that, you have to convince people that there are some issues as the main notion behind causing problems. Later, you need the ability to think about a better approach and check for its costing as well.
- As the final stage, you have to convince multiple stakeholders that the investment is worth it. After that, you need to keep your fingers crossed that you have not offended any ego along the said way.
- It is more like trying to win around 5 matches in a row away from the home when the odds are played right against you.
Heading towards the notion of technical debt and its signs:
Now, the main question popping up right in your mind is more about the signs involving technical debt, no matter whether it is associated with intentional or accidental one. How will you know if the technical debt is high and that you might have to fill up for the bankruptcy soon enough.
- Think it in this way. In this current agile world, you have to develop, build, and even release in a quicker cycle and get some quick or faster feedback from the customers, and then start working on it accordingly.
- This section is only possible if you have in hand abundance of well-engineered and premium quality automated tests known to run fast and then offering confidence that no change is subject to take place, no matter whatever the condition might have been.
- It will really not matter is the breakdown of the tests are in around 68% of unit tests and 32% of integration tests, or even 91% unit test and 9% integration test. The only point is that the tests are subject to run fast and they need to offer confidence to the current stakeholders.
- If not, then releasing the same can turn out to be quite a pain and not possible to release at a regular rate. It means that being Agile and ten getting all the said benefits of it will prove to be quite difficult. At this point, it really does not matter how good the backlog grooming sessions might have been.
Now the main question is what makes it rather difficult for the developers to write a good possible test? It is mainly associated with the term ‘technical debt.’ It really does not matter if that test happens to be an intentional or accidental one over here.
Tools for measuring the same:
There are certain tools available, whose main aim is to measure the technical debt and then put it up right on nice looking SonarQube board. However, usually, these tools can actually pick up the trivial stuff by removing the unused import. These trivial issues are not going to slow anyone down.
The real technical problems are associated with the ones slowing down people as they make it quite harder to opt for any change, fixing the bugs and adding functions and doing all of that quickly with some confidence within. It is because the issues have made things quite harder to tests. Sad enough, there are some technical issues, which are not just something as simple as IDE, PMD or Checkstyle. They are mainly rather deeper in nature and mostly associated with the architectural base of the spectrum.
