Top Causes of Technical Debt and How to Avoid

Have you ever looked at your code and thought, “This is a mess! If I keep going this way, my software will be an unmaintainable mess in no time.”? Well, you’re not alone. Many developers have felt that way at some point in their careers.

Technical debt is an important topic because it can cause serious problems if left unchecked. In this article we’ll discuss reason why technical debt occurs, and how to avoid it!

Budeget Constraints

One of the most common causes of technical debt is budget constraints. If you don’t have the money to do it right, then how can you expect to do it less wrong? The only way out is to make some sacrifices — and those sacrifices may include quality.

When a project has budget restrictions, it’s tempting for engineers to cut corners by writing code that works “good enough” in order to get something out the door on time.

However, if this happens too often, your organization will quickly find itself with a lot of extra work down the road because everything will need to be redone from scratch when new features are added or issues arise.

This makes sense when considering technical debt as an investment: if there aren’t enough resources available at first and no one wants you making commitments they can’t keep (e.g., “we’ll fix these bugs later”), why not just make sure everything works well enough so everyone gets what they want now? It seems like a good trade-off at first glance — but remember that every decision carries consequences!

Overly complex technical design

You’ve probably heard the term technical debt.

It’s a great metaphor for the danger of making overly complex software designs.

The more features you add to your system, the more complex your technical design becomes.

Complexity is a natural consequence of adding new features: it can make it difficult to understand how the system works and it can make it difficult to maintain or extend that complexity when you’re trying to fix bugs or add new functionality.

In fact, many things in life tend towards increasing complexity over time — we get older as our bodies wear out; we gain experience at work and learn new things; most cars become more complicated as they age because newer models always come with additional features (Bluetooth connectivity? Voice control? Auto-parking?). And yet those are all good things!

Poor alignment to standards

Standards are a good thing. They help to avoid technical debt, keep things consistent and make it easier for the team to work together when they need to. Standards can even be used to help with testing and maintenance.

There is one type of standard that you must never adopt because it can cause lots of problems: The “Stupid Standard”. A Stupid Standard is one where there’s no benefit at all, but everyone feels compelled to follow it anyway because they’ve done so in the past (or just because).

Lack of skill

As a developer, you’ve probably had this happen to you: You’re asked to do something, and it’s not exactly in your wheelhouse. It’s complicated; it has a lot of moving parts; and it’s the kind of thing that can be solved by an expert.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn how to solve it on your own! In fact, learning these skills will help you avoid technical debt in the future. And if someone comes along asking for help with some kind of tricky problem again? You’ll be ready — and they’ll thank their lucky stars they didn’t just throw money at their problem instead!

Here are some key things we’ve found helpful in our careers when trying out new things:

• Take risks — and don’t be afraid of failure: If there were no risks involved in trying new things then everyone would already know everything there was to know about programming (which obviously isn’t true). Not only does this mean failing will happen sometimes (and often), but when success does come from taking risks then it makes all that hard work worth it!
• Do research before starting any project: This seems obvious but sometimes people forget basic steps like researching what tools are available before starting a project because they’re too busy thinking about how cool whatever idea is right now might turn out.

Suboptimal code

Your codebase is a living thing, and it will change and grow over time. When this happens, it’s critical that your codebase can support these changes without causing system-wide meltdowns.

Code that is hard to maintain is typically caused by one of the following:

• Code that’s difficult to read or understand because it was written long ago, by someone else, who had different programming skills than you do now.
• Code that requires complex workarounds in order to work around bugs or features lost during refactoring.
• Code that has been modified so many times over different versions of the language or framework being used (e.g., Ruby 1.8 vs 1.9 vs 2) that no one knows how all those patches interact with each other anymore (this is especially true if each person who worked on the code decided to use their own style).

Delayed refactoring

The first, and perhaps most significant, cause of technical debt is delayed refactoring.

Refactoring is the process of changing your codebase in small ways to make it easier to manage and maintain over time. It usually entails extracting common functions from one part of your system and putting them into their own module, which can then be shared with other parts of your system.

This reduces duplication and makes each part easier to understand by breaking it up into smaller components with well-defined interfaces between them. If you don’t do this regularly as you write new features or update existing ones, then eventually you’ll end up with a big mess of code that’s hard to understand or reason about because everything is intertwined in an ad hoc way.

Insufficient testing

If you’re working on any kind of software project, testing is a great way to reduce technical debt. Testing is not only part of the development process but also a powerful technique that helps prevent bugs by finding them before they make it into production. In fact, developers with high test coverage are less likely to incur bugs during production and thus incur less technical debt.

With that said, there are several types of tests that should be performed in order for your codebase to be healthy: unit tests (to ensure individual components work), integration tests (to ensure multiple components work together), and system-level acceptance tests (to ensure the full system works as expected). These types of testing should be performed throughout the development lifecycle — at least once per phase — and preferably more often.

Technical Debt is a natural part of the software development process, but if you watch out for it, you will stay ahead of the curve.

The problem with Technical Debt is that it can get out of hand quickly and impede your progress if not kept in check. Just like financial debt, there’s no point in trying to “write off” any technical debt that has accumulated over time. If anything, it should be addressed as soon as possible so you can avoid paying interest on your mistakes later on down the road.

Conclusion

Remember, the goal of software development is to build something that works. Technical Debt is a natural part of the process and can help you get there faster. But it’s important to watch out for how your team handles it, or else you risk building an unmaintainable system that’ll slow down your development time in the long run.