Technical Debt: What is it and How to Manage it? — Part 1
All product-based companies and software development teams face a situation that the product manager should decide to sacrifice some necessary and infrastructural activities to respond to the board of directors, higher management, or to stay on the roadmap deadlines. This phenomenon causes the “Technical Debt” in teams. In this article we will review basic and informal meaning of the technical debt following with some methods to handle the technical debts in an effective way in the organization.
What is “Technical Debt”?
Technical debt is a metaphorical term used in software development to describe the consequences of taking shortcuts or making sub optimal decisions during the development process.
It represents the trade-off between short-term gains and long-term costs. Just like financial debt, technical debt accumulates interest over time and must eventually be paid off. If left unaddressed, it can hinder a product’s future development, decrease its quality, and impede innovation.
Technical debt can arise from various factors, such as tight deadlines, lack of resources, evolving requirements, or the need to deliver quick results. It can manifest in different forms, including poorly designed code, duplicated functionality, inadequate documentation, or outdated dependencies. These shortcuts and compromises may enable faster initial development, but they can lead to challenges down the line. As a product evolves and new features are added, the accumulated technical debt can make it harder to maintain, debug, and enhance the product, ultimately affecting its performance, scalability, and reliability.
Technical Debts affect product performance, scalability, and reliability.
Recognizing and managing technical debt is essential for successful product development. It requires a balance between delivering new features and investing in maintenance and refactoring efforts.
Technical product managers play a critical role in navigating this balance, advocating for the necessary resources and time to address technical debt, and ensuring that the product remains sustainable and adaptable in the long run. By actively managing technical debt, product teams can mitigate risks, improve product quality, and maintain a healthy development pace, enabling them to respond effectively to evolving customer needs and market demands.
The Impact of Technical Debt on Product Development
Unaddressed technical debt can have a profound impact on product development, affecting the product’s quality, customer experience, and the team’s productivity. Here are some key areas where technical debt can cause significant challenges:
1. Increased Complexity: As technical debt accumulates; the complexity of the code base grows. This complexity can hinder developers’ ability to understand, modify, and extend the code, resulting in longer development cycles, increased debugging time, and reduced overall productivity. Also, this will lead to hard handover process for any developer in the team which will cause plenty of human resources management issues.
2. Diminished Quality: Technical debt often leads to a decline in product quality. Code that is hastily written or lacks proper testing may contain bugs, vulnerabilities, or performance bottlenecks.
3. Limited Innovation: Technical debt can stifle innovation by restricting the team’s ability to introduce new features or make significant architectural changes.
4. Increased Maintenance Effort: Neglected technical debt requires constant maintenance and patchwork fixes. This ongoing effort drains resources and limits the team’s capacity to focus on strategic initiatives or address other pressing issues.
Addressing Technical Debt: Striking the Balance
Effectively managing technical debt requires a proactive approach that strikes the right balance between innovation and maintenance. It involves making deliberate decisions and investments to pay off existing debt while minimizing the accrual of new debt.
In the next sections of this article, we will explore strategies and best practices for navigating technical debt. We will discuss techniques for identifying, prioritizing, and addressing technical debt, as well as preventive measures to minimize its accumulation. Additionally, we will examine the role of a technical product manager in advocating for the necessary resources, fostering a culture of sustainable development, and communicating the importance of managing technical debt to stakeholders.
By embracing these strategies and adopting a mindset that values long-term product sustainability, technical product managers can effectively navigate the complex landscape of technical debt, ensuring that their products continue to evolve, innovate, and meet the needs of their customers.
Stay tuned for the next section: “Identifying and Prioritizing Technical Debt: Shedding Light on Hidden Challenges.”
