What is Technical Debt & How can Platform Engineering Help Pay it off

What is Technical Debt? 

Technical debt, also known as tech debt or code debt, refers to the cost of additional rework caused by choosing the fastest solution instead of the best solution that would usually take longer. 

The term “technical debt” was initially coined by software developer and author Ward Cunningham in 1992. In a speech where he first compared the concept of technical debt with financial debt, he explained that shipping codes with known issues or shortcuts can create a form of technical debt that one has to address or pay back later. 

Fast forward to 2024, the consequences of technical debt are not uncommon for start-ups and established organizations alike. In a recent McKinsey survey, CIOs reported that 10-20% of the technology budget that should have gone to new product development was actually diverted to resolving issues brought by technical debt. Moreover, 60% felt that their organization’s technical debt was growing significantly over the past three years. Companies are now paying an additional 10-20% cost on each project to cover the impact of technical debt. Some companies have even reported that in a 30-month period, the tech teams could only complete half of the initially planned development work because of ongoing technical issues that they have to fix. 

Types of Technical Debt

Broadly speaking, technical debt can be categorized into two primary types, namely intentional and unintentional debt. 

Intentional technical debt is mostly incurred as a conscious decision to opt for a less-than-optimal solution due to a number of constraints and limitations, such as limited resources, business demands or tight deadlines. This decision is usually made by both the business and tech teams and is often strategy-based. For example, a team may be able to accept some debt to speed up time to market, with a plan to address the debt in the future. As these decisions are made with a business purpose in mind, they are often well-documented and can be tracked so that they can be addressed in the future. 

Unintentional technical debt, on the other hand, is often incurred due to a lack of knowledge or awareness or as simple mistakes. It can be caused by insufficient planning or testing, inexperience in best practices, or changes in technology that render previous decisions obsolete. Unintentional debt is often harder to track and manage and may only come to light when it starts to cause problems. 

The Technical Debt Quadrant Martin Fowler, a well-known software engineer and an iconic figure in the field of software development, expanded upon the intentional/unintentional categorization of technical debt by introducing the Technical Debt Quadrant. This framework is now extensively utilized by businesses to more effectively differentiate various types of technical debt, aiding in their strategic management.

1. Prudent + Deliberate: you make the decision to release quickly with the consequences of this “quick fix” in mind. You have scheduled remediation to fix foreseeable issues, but you also believe that the benefits of a quick delivery outweigh the debt. 
2. Prudent + Inadvertent: this happens when you don’t know of the errors or consequences before the release. You accept that a better solution can be implemented next time. 
3. Reckless + Inadvertent: this is usually due to a lack of experience or knowledge, where the team doesn’t know a mistake has been made. 
4. Reckless + Deliberate: you are aware of the best practice, but still go against it, in exchange for a speedy delivery. 

Until a decade ago, technical debts were merely distinguished by intentions, instead of specific natures. Academics later proposed, in a paper named “Towards an Ontology of Terms of Technical Debt“, 13 distinct types of technical debt that may remediate the discrepancy, including: 

• Architecture debt
• Build debt
• Code debt
• Defect debt
• Design debt
• Documentation debt
• Infrastructure debt
• People debt
• Process debt
• Requirement debt
• Service debt
• Test automation debt
• Test debt

What Causes Technical Debt? 

Technical debt fundamentally accrues when business goals and deadlines collide with best software design and implementation practices. In fact, it happens in virtually all organizations. “Done is better than perfect” – if you always wait until the last line of code is perfect before you deploy, your business probably won’t be around for long. 

In the ever-changing market where users expect and demand updates and additional features frequently, where regulations may change overnight, or when investors have time-sensitive business visions, the pressure to deliver is high. In an ideal world, application design and implementation decisions should go hand-in-hand with business timelines and goals. But in reality, business leaders and developers often have to find compromises and trade quality with speed. In our experience helping clients in various sectors, whether they are SMEs or MNCs, technical debt is most commonly caused by one or a combination of the following reasons: 

1. Time Pressure 

“When the business puts too great an emphasis on deadlines, the team often cuts corners to try to meet them,” Christian Nelson, a VP of engineering once said. Unfortunately, that is the truth. We have seen many clients incur technical debt because the development team needs to forgo writing clean code, keeping detailed documentation or building clean data sources to meet business deadlines. Sometimes, they opt for shortening planning, design or testing time, so to keep up with the release schedules. More often than not, this is a conscious and deliberate business decision made by both business and tech because speed-to-market is critical and resources may be limited, which leads to our next point. 

2. Business Priority Shift & Limited Resources

Technical debt fundamentally accrues when business goals and deadlines collide with best software design and implementation practices. In fact, it happens in virtually all organizations. “Done is better than perfect” – if you always wait until the last line of code is perfect before you deploy, your business probably won’t be around for long. 

In the ever-changing market where users expect and demand updates and additional features frequently, where regulations may change overnight, or when investors have time-sensitive business visions, the pressure to deliver is high. In an ideal world, application design and implementation decisions should go hand-in-hand with business timelines and goals. But in reality, business leaders and developers often have to find compromises and trade quality with speed. In our experience helping clients in various sectors, whether they are SMEs or MNCs, technical debt is most commonly caused by one or a combination of the following reasons: 

3. Heavy Cognitive Load 

Modern application delivery requires DevOps teams to be involved with multiple coding languages, frameworks, libraries, etc. Sometimes, they also need to deal with legacy systems left by their predecessors without proper and concise documentation. Developers can no longer just focus on writing good codes and being innovative in application development. Without a transparent approach and a dedicated platform with consistent workflow and tooling, this cognitive load will further exacerbate technical debt. 

Is Technical Debt Bad? 

Just like financial debt, technical debt is neither good or bad. While financial debt can enable you to pursue your dream or implement significant improvements in your life, technical debt can be a good trade for accelerated development and early market entry. It may also allow for rapid scaling of your business. However, just as with financial debt, it is essential for to acknowledge and manage technical debt wisely, so it does not hinder long-term growth and sustainability. 

How Does Technical Debt Impact Your Business?

Although technical debt is not inherently bad, it can quickly spiral out of control without a strategic approach to pay off technical debt. Not only will you miss out on external business opportunities, but you will also likely experience various productivity and sustainability issues within your team. 

The consequences of technical debt 

We have seen it often: technical debt can create a huge headaches for businesses, impacting application quality, customer satisfaction, productivity and morale, etc. Here are some of the consequences technical debt can damage your business: 

• Impaired performance and customer satisfaction: technical debt can cause performance-related problems, such as bugs, system malfunction and generally a downgrade of product and service quality. 
• Reduced productivity: as technical debt worsens, your developers may encounter more problems working with the existing code base. Eventually, they must devote more time and resources to fixing old problems and paying off technical debts, forgoing developing new features and improving the product. 
• Longer development cycle and higher maintenance costs: managing and paying off technical debt, especially unintentional debt, takes time and resources. When technical debt is long-accumulated and severe, you may even require external help to investigate and implement changes, which will drive up operational costs. 
• Elevated risk: unresolved technical debt is a time bomb for application and organizational security as you may be more prone to security breaches or compliance violations. Especially for sensitive industries, technical debt opens the door to more vulnerabilities; you can encounter heightened financial risks, including direct asset loss and regulatory fines and penalties. 
• Low team morale and hindered innovation: constantly dealing with technical debt can frustrate many developers. Continuously troubleshooting to pay off technical debt without proper documentation isn’t the kind of creative and inspirational work every developer dreams of. Teams with high technical debt tend to have low morale, leading to sluggish innovation and a high turnover rate.

Top 4 Ways to Help Pay off Technical Debt with Platform Engineering

Research found that the average developer spends 13.5 hours, almost one-third of the total work time, on addressing technical debt. Without a sound strategy to pay off and prevent further technical debt, companies cannot sustain themselves and will eventually fall into a debt spiral. Much like credit card debt, without adjusting your spending habits, you will find yourself spending a lot of time paying interest alone. 

But it’s not all doom and gloom! There are many ways that platform engineering can help manage, reduce, and pay off technical debt for your business. Here are the top 4 tips:

1. Avoid tech debt with standardization and good governance 

The best way to avoid technical debt accumulation is to minimize it as much as possible from the beginning. Platform engineering offers standardization in the development processes, tooling and environments, which reduces complexity and variability that can create technical debt.

Additionally, with code quality tools and automated code reviews embedded in the building process, platform engineering can ensure a high coding standard and good governance throughout the company, regardless of location and experience. This helps to reduce the chance of occurring code and design debt in the first place. 

Whether your platform engineering team is building a platform from scratch, or to save time and resources, opting for a platform engineering tool with customizable features, by having a centralized portal and a consistent approach, developers spend less time troubleshooting issues and more on addressing core functionality and paying off existing technical debt. 

2. Assess what you owe with a better metrics overview

The first and most critical step in repaying any technical debt is to assess what you owe. You need to ask yourself: what parts have the highest error rates? Where are the bottlenecks occurring? With more transparency offered by platform engineering, you can easily spot any technical problems in real-time, before they bring your site or application down. 

And you shouldn’t stop there because the bigger question is: what is the state of your operational debt? Are you having recurring issues because your team may be doing tasks that should be automated, saving time and money, and preventing errors? 

3. Automating tests and tasks to minimize technical debt 

Automation is one of the foundations of platform engineering. By automating tasks during the building, deployment and testing workflows, teams usually see drastic improvement in error rate and application quality. Automating the testing procedure, in particular, can help identify and address deficits early on in the development cycle. Automation takes the burden off of your shoulders and allows you to meet tight business deadlines without sacrificing quality.  

4. Track progress with visibility and transparency

Tranparent communication across teams is crucial in repaying technical debt. Sure, developers and business executives have their own lingo. But ultimately, to pay off technical debt effectively is a collective and organized endeavor that requires effective. collaboration. Platform engineering provides a clear view of the entire development process so all teams have high visibility and can identify and address issues related to code quality, architecture, or design on time. If your platform engineering tool offers customizable dashboards that can help you focus on different areas of the project status, code quality and deployment health, make sure to use that. It also allows for better resource allocation to critical areas that may otherwise be neglected and turn into technical debt. 

More importantly, this level of transparency brought by platform engineering fosters a culture of innovation, continuous improvement and accountability. Team members are empowered to become aware of their impact on the overall health of the project, motivating them to uphold best practices and reduce shortcuts that will lead to technical debt. Clear progress and performance tracking can offer valuable lessons about past mistakes and better ways forward. 

Need Help Paying Off Technical Debt?  

Is technical debt hindering your company’s growth and dampening your team morale and productivity? We understand that managing technical debt can be an overwhelming task, but you do not have to do it alone. There are many solutions out there that can help you assess where your technical debt lies, or better, to help you prevent any accumulation of technical debt in the first place. RE:FORM is one of them. 

RE:FORM is an All-In-One Platform Engineering Tool that offers smart, self-service and scalable solutions to supercharge your software and application delivery from start to finish. Applications built with RE:FORM rely on standardized architectures and workflow, and enjoy all-rounded benefits for business, tech, Ops and security teams. Contact our team for a free consultation to see how we can help you minimize technical debt with platform engineering solutions.