Balancing Technical Debt with Innovation

Introduction

Did you know that most developers spend one-third of their time addressing technical debt or that 51% of developers consider quitting because of technical debt? 😩

Technical debt, similar to financial debt, accumulates interest over time, making future modifications more challenging and expensive. This isn’t the first time I’ve written about technical debt, but I’ve seen several articles in my feed talking about it, so I wanted to share my strategies for addressing it systemically.

Technical debt consists of design or implementation constructs that are expedient in the short term but that set up a technical context that can make a future change more costly or impossible. [A] liability to … maintainability and evolvability.
— Managing Technical Debt: Reducing Friction in Software Development, p. 5.

The most visible impact is that your teams spend more time fixing issues caused by technical debt instead of innovating and developing new features. “Deadlines get missed, roadmaps go nowhere, and developer morale drops.”

Balancing technical debt with innovation is critical for your company to grow and scale. A systemic approach facilitates better scalability, productivity, long-term cost savings, and an advantage in attracting and keeping talented engineers.

Understanding Technical Debt

Technical debt can be broadly classified in two ways (or as many as four):

Intentional: “This solution is less than ideal, but our schedule or budget doesn’t allow for a better one.”
Unintentional: “A few years ago, Jack the Intern built that. A small but critical utility. Nobody knows how it works, but every month it is wildly important.”

Ideally, most of your teams’ technical debt falls into the intentional category.

Functionally, it falls into five main buckets:

Code Debt: Poor coding practices, such as code duplication, incomplete error handling, or lack of adherence to coding standards.
Design Debt: Compromises made in the software’s architecture or design, leading to reduced flexibility, scalability, or maintainability.
Testing Debt: A lack of proper testing, resulting in insufficient test coverage and increased potential for bugs or defects.
Documentation Debt: Documentation is not adequately maintained or lacks clarity, making it challenging for developers to understand and maintain the codebase.
Infrastructure Debt: Outdated or inefficient underlying technologies, frameworks, or infrastructure components that impede development productivity or hinder performance.

— How to Calculate Technical Debt Ratio

Even the best teams don’t have to do anything wrong to accumulate technical debt. Many decisions that are right in the moment aren’t right forever, and that’s part of the journey.

Assuming adequate design and planning practices, at mature companies, I see three principal causes of intentional technical debt:

Growth: What worked when you had 100 users doesn’t work as well when you have 10,000.
Time: All those third-party libraries your software relies on need to be updated.
Rushed Development: “Because of various externalities, we need to ship this software ASAP!”

Tackling technical debt organizationally begins with creating a shared definition of Technical Debt.

The Risks of Ignoring Technical Debt

Not having a plan to deal with technical debt is an enormous risk to the success of your organization. The consequences directly oppose the success of your users, management, and company.

Technical debt is a business issue that impacts employee retention, application lifecycle costs, and organizational agility. It leaves teams feeling drained and your organization shipping less user-facing functionality every development cycle.

Short-term Risks

Reduced Code Quality: More bugs, more issues.
Increased Development Time: Quick fixes initially speed things up but require more attention the longer they are in production.
More Stress: Constant bug fixing and firefighting will wear out your folks and create morale problems.
Cost Savings: In the very short term, incurring technical debt saves money by avoiding the costs associated with a well-planned approach.

Long-term Risks

Increased Maintenance Costs: The longer a high technical debt solution is in production, the less cost-effective it is to keep it there.
Slower Feature Development: Customer-facing features ship slower each cycle due to an increasingly complex and fragile codebase.
Decreased Product Quality and User Satisfaction: Applications will become more fragile over time.
Reduced Scalability and Flexibility
Difficulty in Onboarding New Developers: It takes longer for new developers to become productive.

As a consultant, I have worked with several companies that struggled to release new features and had a difficult time keeping developers (<12 months). Two key symptoms of a failure to address technical debt.

Fostering a Culture of Responsible Innovation

Creating a Balance

Central to this culture is the recognition of technical debt as a natural part of the development process, not as a failure or setback. Teams should view managing technical debt as an opportunity to refine and enhance their work, rather than a burdensome task. This mindset shift encourages developers to approach debt proactively, integrating its management into their daily work rather than treating it as an afterthought.

Not all technical debt is created equal. Some debts have a more immediate and profound impact on your products and teams than others. It is crucial to assess and categorize technical debt based on factors like severity, user impact, and the potential for future complications.

Role of Leadership in Promoting Culture

Both innovation and technical health need to be prized in an organization. Leadership plays a crucial role in shaping this culture. Leaders can motivate their teams to strike a healthy balance by recognizing and rewarding efforts that both advance innovation and address technical debt.

Managing technical debt as a part of overall technical health should be celebrated as a path to greater organizational agility, velocity, scalability, more reliable budgeting/forecasting, and employee retention. This includes acknowledging the long-term benefits of reducing technical debt, even if it means a short-term slowdown in feature development.

Encouraging Team Accountability

Coach your engineering leaders on identifying and classifying technical debt and recording it in their product backlog. Set a tone that values responsible innovation. Encourage your teams to make strategic decisions about incurring and addressing technical debt.

Regular, blameless team discussions on the state of the codebase, open acknowledgment of the impact of technical debt, and shared responsibility for both innovation and maintenance are key. This involves creating an environment where discussing technical debt is as common as discussing new features or technologies. Education can also play a role in helping team members understand the implications of technical debt.

Tackle technical debt alongside new features in every cycle. Celebrate closed technical debt tickets as much as new feature deployment. Reducing technical debt makes your products healthier and improves your developer experience, making it easier to ship new features with increased velocity.

Practical Approaches to Managing Technical Debt

The simplest way to identify systemic technical debt is to ask your engineering teams, “What’s the most painful part of adding new features to the application?” If multiple teams come back with similar answers, you can identify systemic causes.

Coach your engineering managers to prioritize areas of the codebase based on factors like the frequency of changes, criticality to the system, or areas where bugs commonly occur.

Identifying and Assessing Technical Debt

There are no magic bullets here, but there are plenty of helpful resources for your teams.

Implement regular code reviews to identify areas of technical debt early.
Schedule regular refactoring sessions as part of the development cycle to address and reduce technical debt.
Gather Technical Debt metrics at a project, platform, and/or organizational level.

Key metrics include:

$\text{Technical Debt Ratio (TDR)} = \left(\frac{\text{Remediation Cost}}{\text{Development Cost}}\right) \times 100$
- < 5% → Healthy Project
- > 10% → High Risk
Defect Percentage:
$\text{Defect Percentage} = \left(\frac{\text{Number of New Bugs}}{\text{Number of Closed Bugs}}\right) \times 100$
Lead Time: Time between the commitment to a task and its release.
$\text{Change Failure Rate (CFR)} = \frac{\text{Number of Failed Changes}}{\text{Total Number of Changes}}$
$\text{CI/CD Event Failures} = \frac{\text{Number of Failed Events}}{\text{Total Number of Events}}$

Integrate Debt Reduction into Development Cycles

Dedicate time for debt management: Allocate specific sprints or portions of sprints solely for addressing technical debt. If this is new to your teams, consider dedicating 20% of development time to technical debt, including documentation and automated testing.
Balance feature development and debt reduction: Ensure each development cycle includes efforts to reduce technical debt alongside new features.

Use of Automation and Tools

Implement tools for automated code analysis: Detect potential problems and areas of improvement early.
Use documentation tools: Ensure knowledge capture to mitigate risks associated with knowledge loss.
Create technical debt dashboards: Provide visibility into the current state of technical debt, making it easier for teams to address it.

Innovating While Reducing Technical Debt

Innovation doesn’t have to halt to address technical debt. Encourage your teams to find ways to innovate that also help reduce debt, like refactoring old code with new technologies or improving system architecture while adding features.

I recommend Working Effectively with Legacy Code if your teams find a piecemeal approach challenging. It supports a metrics-based approach to improving fragile codebases.

Conclusion

Balancing technical debt with innovation is a strategic challenge. It requires a thoughtful approach and a culture that values long-term sustainability. By understanding and managing technical debt, fostering a culture of responsible innovation, and employing practical approaches, organizations can ensure their software development efforts remain innovative and sustainable.