Is your company dealing with technical debt? Are you looking for solutions to handle and address this issue? If yes, then this blog has all the answers to your problem. So keep reading!
In this article, you will get a detailed overview of what technical debt means, what are the reasons for technical debt, how companies incur technical debt, and how DevOps can help businesses in solving this issue. So let’s begin!
What is technical debt?
Technical debt is incurred when businesses choose a faster, easy or sub-optimal solution to solve a problem in a short time instead of using a better and permanent solution that would take longer.
The larger the project is, the more technical debt it has, and, like financial debt, technical debt also has an interest. As the project continues to grow, it becomes more expensive and challenging to address problems due to the scale of change required to handle the debt and lost knowledge.
Therefore, it is always better and cheaper to deal with the debt early. Having a DevOps team can help in early detection thus slowing down the accumulation of technical debt.
What causes technical debt?
Before solving any problem, it is critical to examine the causes. There are two main sources of technical debt:
- Technical leadership problems such as flawed review processes, poor technological design, documentation, tools, and test suites.
- Business requirements such as changing conditions and time pressure.
How DevOps Teams Accumulate Technical Debt?
Technical debt is a direct result of time pressure. Mostly, when a team has to meet a delivery date, it tends to leave some lower-priority bugs for later which results in technical accumulation.
At the same time, businesses also try to address some of the higher-priority issues using easy and quick fixes. The intention is to address them in the future but realistically, they tend to remain things “to do” for a long time. As a result, developers become less inclined to address the issue and lose the context as time goes by.
How DevOps can help businesses in technical debt?
These are the three crucial DevOps practices that can help businesses to address the technical dept challenge:
1. Create DevOps product teams
One of the key principles of DevOps is creating multidisciplinary and small teams (i.e. Dev + Ops) who own and can control the entire lifecycle of a product or service from creation to delivery.
Because these teams are aware of the impact of technical debt they are highly motivated to pay it back to make things simpler. Therefore, the management must actively motivate DevOps Teams and reward them for rooting out the causes and addressing technical debt.
2. Use containers
Companies building new, cloud-native applications typically use containers to improve scalability and flexibility at a lower total cost of ownership. The ‘microservices‘ architectural pattern works great in synchronization with containers and small multidisciplinary DevOps teams.
This way, each microservice has a small, clear bounded context and is managed by a dedicated team. So, technical debt becomes easier to identify and fix.
3. Leverage DevOps Automation
Automation is the soul and heart of any DevOps approach. Therefore, if you want to offset current technical debt while avoiding future debt, you need to leverage DevOps automation.
Automating routine, time-intensive, and error-prone processes can enable your employees to keep their focus and time on relieving technical debt.
Conclusion
In conclusion, every company can address technical debt by making small changes in its approach. Businesses need to run towards technical debt rather than away from it to actively reduce the technical debt that is bogging their organization down.
Therefore, if you want to avoid your business facing any technical debt you need to hire a DevOps service provider.
