![]() Signs of technical debt are not always obvious, but there are indicators that can help teams identify and tackle technical debt. The goal of managing technical debt is to accelerate development and improve daily work for engineering teams by making code easier to understand and faster to build upon in the future. Even small issues, such as outdated packages or missing tests, can accumulate as a type of technical debt over time. ![]() Other types of technical debt don’t require sweeping changes, but need continuous time and effort to make code more readable, reusable, and reliable, often through refactoring. Known as design debt, this type of technical debt tracks architectural improvements needed to maintain long-term performance and stability of an application. Some types of technical debt can be extremely complex, requiring radical fixes like full migrations or architecture overhauls. Tightly coupled architecture: When changes to a codebase impact many other parts of the codebase, teams are more likely to create one-off solutions or encounter unexpected behavior.Long-lived branches typically accrue more debt than short-lived branches. Long-lived branches: Branches accrue technical debt, which teams must pay down when they finally merge them into the main branch.Lack of standards and frameworks: Without team-wide standards, such as linters and test requirements, changes to the codebase may not meet team expectations for structure, clarity, and formatting.Without a deep understanding of their codebase, developers can inadvertently add complexity to the codebase with new workarounds or shortcuts. Lack of knowledge sharing: Documentation helps team members better understand their team’s code and the decisions that led to each change.Code complexity: Complex code can make it more difficult for developers to make changes, which can lead to complicated edge cases and unexpected behavior.Duplicated code can also make a codebase harder to navigate and understand. As a result, duplicated code increases the amount of neglected or forgotten code, which can lead to unforeseen problems during development. Duplicated code: Code with similar functionality in multiple places requires developers to maintain more code.The result is a fragile and brittle codebase, sometimes referred to as software rot. Each new feature requires workarounds to integrate with other workarounds. Existing technical debt: When teams don’t have enough time to pay down technical debt, they continue to accrue additional debt on top of their existing debt.Changing requirements can be a result of poor planning or sudden changes in the market, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Changing requirements: Product designs can change while a project is already underway, forcing engineering teams to adapt quickly to meet their deadlines.They prioritize speed over correctness due to business demands, incurring technical debt with the hope of taking advantage of a market opportunity to win new customers. Time constraints: When teams need to meet their deadlines, they sometimes opt for shortcuts or simpler implementations.What are the most common causes of technical debt? If teams don’t make all the necessary changes to the codebase at the same time, they should consider any uncompleted items to be technical debt. Dependencies, components, and services must evolve together to keep production up and running. When teams make changes to their codebase, they often need to make changes across many different parts to ensure everything works in unison. In short, it is the price teams must pay at some point in the future to make their software efficient, scalable, and maintainable again. Technical debt, sometimes also known as code debt, is the cost of rework incurred when teams optimize for short-term requirements, rather than implementing more robust long-term solutions. The result of these decisions is commonly known as technical debt. Engineering teams often face speed, cost, and bandwidth constraints that lead them to choose quick, simple, and easy solutions over advanced, time-consuming solutions.
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