Technical debt is a fact of development life, but being smart about remediation will prevent it from derailing your projects
Developing software means balancing artful code against financial imperatives. It’s not always possible to build code polished to the highest sheen when go-to-market demands put a time crunch on the process. When a development team prioritizes quick turnarounds over perfect code, they end up with technical debt (also known as tech debt, code debt, or design debt). This code may include bugs or tedious workarounds that, if left unaddressed, could negatively affect the product and future development efforts.
Tech debt is as natural to development as financial debt is to running a business. However, team leaders must manage it effectively to prevent bloated workflows, inferior product quality, and damage to the company’s reputation. That’s why DevOps teams need robust technical debt remediation strategies that help them minimize and address tech debt before it balloons out of control.
Technical Debt Remediation Strategies
Identify and Prioritize Major Debt
Not every instance of technical debt carries the same weight. It’s crucial to determine which debt cases require urgent attention and which can simmer a little longer while the team works on new features. There are generally two factors to consider when setting priorities for technical debt remediation: the code’s age and its effect on the end user.
Code age carries two critical implications. As a project grows and accumulates tech debt, the older debt becomes more challenging and expensive to address. That’s because as time passes, knowledge of the debt atrophies, and more systems are built on top of the compromised code. Developers who eventually take on the task of technical debt remediation will have more work to do on older compromises than newer ones. Furthermore, inefficient old code will increase how long it takes to rebuild new features that have incorporated it. It’s a lot like compounding interest on financial debt, and can be just as difficult to overcome if it goes too long without being addressed.
The second factor, how the debt affects end users, is easy to understand. If one section of code causes a significantly higher number of end-user bugs than the others, it is causing outsized damage to the company’s reputation.
By weighing these two factors, your DevOps team can categorize and rank tech debt from high to low priority. That clarifies what the team needs to work on next, which can help prevent tech debt from spiraling out of control.
Conduct Technical Debt Remediation as Soon as Possible
Managing the interest on technical debt is critical for healthy feature growth. Without it, small compromises can eat up days of productivity when it comes time to fix them. DevOps teams should track the accumulation of tech debt as rigorously as possible. Where have they made compromises for speed? How might those compromises affect future work? Maintaining these records makes it easier to perform technical debt remediation on a rolling basis.
To that end, DevOps leaders can include tech debt review in the backlog and schedule maintenance sprints to address it. Higher priority instances of technical debt can take all-hands-on-deck attention, and then team members can gradually peel off to other tasks while the rest of the team works through the remaining instances of debt.
Get exclusive insights in our detailed guide on What is Technical Debt?
Automate
Automating routine, time-consuming tasks provides several benefits for tech debt remediation. For one, automation reduces the input humans have on the developing process. That means fewer chances for human error to create more technical debt inadvertently.
Automation as part of continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) also frees up developer time through automated testing, automated build, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC). These tools can take large quantities of simple coding out of developer workflows, make it easier to identify tech debt at earlier stages, and thus empower developers to perform more effective technical debt remediation.
If your team is looking to rapidly spin up cloud infrastructure automation efforts, DuploCloud's low-code/no-code DevOps Automation platform can help. It makes implementing IaC and other automation tools easy and quick while staying within regulatory standards such as PCI DSS, SOC 2, HIPAA, and more. To learn how DuploCloud DevOps Automation can 10x your deployment speeds and lower costs by 75%, click here.
Foster a DevOps Culture
Identifying and addressing technical debt requires constant communication among team members. Good thing, then, that DevOps teams are built upon a foundation of open and constant collaboration across teams. The DevOps model provides autonomy and ownership for each employee, and in turn, each gives continuous feedback and works toward continuous improvement. The more deeply ingrained this culture is in your teams, the more naturally they’ll communicate about the state of your tech debt. That will also make them better at setting priorities in technical debt remediation.
Striving for constant improvement and sharing feedback also empowers each developer to adapt their coding to minimize bugs and raise the floor for code quality. That will help them generate less tech debt moving forward without spending more time on each task.
Maintain Exact Code Standards
High code standards and precise code standards are not the same, and precision may be the more important of the two. The more clear and precise your standards are, the more exacting your quality gates will be at code check-in. That makes it easy to catch mistakes, fix them, run tests, and deploy without creating tech debt that has to be addressed down the line.
That’s not to say having high standards for code cleanliness doesn’t matter. It can stop developers from cutting corners in code writing, which is one of the main contributors to tech debt. Good developers want to be challenged en route to success. That gives them pride and ownership over their work. DevOps leaders who hold their teams to high but attainable standards often see high morale in addition to time and money savings through reduced remediation.
Addressing Tech Debt with DuploCloud
Technical debt is a fact of DevOps, but there are myriad ways to ensure the debt your team takes on is strictly necessary, minimal, and quickly remediated. With DuploCloud, you can easily standardize your infrastructure, automate tests for security, reliability, and scalability, and hand your team the tools for rapid development cycles that maintain compliance standards. That means spending less time on technical debt remediation even as you reduce costs. Click here to schedule a free demo today.
