To know about tech debt and its management you have first to know about the metaphor and the reason behind its usage. It is used as an effective way of communication regarding the necessity of refactoring and improvement jobs related to any source code developed which may have defects in its architecture. You can do it if you estimate the time required to fix the defect of the code by ascertaining the principal of the debt and comparing the information with the data of other projects. Information should include remaining days before the date of release of such code, the situation and the plan of repayment for the particular tech debt.
Factors Incurring Tech Debt
The factors that incur tech debt may be varied and of different types. These may be related to the structure of the code, its architecture, design and pattern, duplication and documentation, test coverage, complexity, potential bugs, code smells, style and practices of coding and much more. All these factors affect your code as they have a negative impact on the productivity and functionality of the code. Tech debt may occur during the lifetime of any project and may be detected as time progresses. You will come to know of the domain of application and realize that your initial architecture has acquired technical debt.
Types Of Tech Debt
There is no reason to believe that any issue related to code is a technical debt as identified defects are quality debts and not tech debt. If there is any lack of process, it is not tech debt either but a process debt like the configuration management debt. Similarly, debts which are results of any wrong or delayed feature are mistaken as tech debt, but they are Feature debts. If debts that arise due to inconsistent or any poor user experience should not be considered as a tech debt but as User Experience debt or Skill debt if it is a result of lack of skills.
Good Or Bad
Tech debt is not always bad for business provided it is not ignored for long and allowed to accumulate. If releasing a code prematurely is not bad which deliver business value in the short run, but you must be conscious that it would sooner or later hurt your business. Therefore, at some point in time, you must pay back at least a portion of the accumulated tech debt. There are several ways to pay back your tech debt, and you can click here to know more about such ways and find that surprisingly no magic one fits for all situations.
Analysis Of Tech Debt
Tech debt should be transparent and properly analyzed as all are not same and there are several points to consider analyzing it. You must first consider the attributes of it in detail and rationalize it according to the type of impact it may have on your business. The quantum and duration and timing of the impact, the age of it, the cost of refactoring, dependency on other items, along with the business value of the component must also be considered for proper analysis.
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