Developers are under unprecedented pressure to move from traditional infrastructure to modern infrastructure, reduce inefficiencies, and create products that build customer satisfaction and increase revenue. Many businesses are moving forward with DevOps thinking, but as they move forward, they may forget one thing, technical debt. Sure, developers can move quickly and break something, but never really fix it. Therefore, the accumulation of technical debt leads to the decline of engineering productivity and the rise of production costs.
Earlier this year, Umser Mansoor did a little survey on tech debt for CodeHoy. The survey found that of 91 respondents, 68 percent of developers said they were developing products with high or very high tech debt. Technical debt costs the company extremely high costs every year and has a devastating effect on the engineering team.
1. Time wasters
Can you imagine your development team spending nearly three months (or more) of the year in technical debt with no hope of achieving kpIs? A Swedish survey conducted a longitudinal study of software developers and found that software developers lost an average of 23% of their working time due to technical debt.
These figures are backed up by studies of large software companies, which have found that the cost of managing large software companies’ technical debt is enormous, estimated to average 25% of the entire development time. According to A Stripe study, that number is even as high as 33%! This is a huge expense that can be avoided.
To make matters worse, as detailed in the Swedish study, resolving technical debt only becomes more challenging over time, because any addition to the code base is done on top of a system that no longer works, so bugs and glitches compound. The team is infected with technical debt, and it’s contagious.
On the value side, the ability to build faster and ship faster is hampered. It’s hard to time the work, and the profit margin on delivered code falls.
What debts are people wasting time on?
According to the Swedish study, wasted time is usually spent performing additional tests, followed by additional source code analysis and additional refactoring. “Usually it takes longer to get the right solution,” said one respondent. It’s always more or less a matter of time. Usually, when you introduce technical debt, it’s because something comes up. It’s not quite the way we think about how we plan to develop software.”
The Codeahoy study attributed technical debt to several factors, including outdated libraries, lack of documentation, poor code quality, bloated overall, static analysis tools not included in the development process, lack of unit testing, haphazard architecture, poor design decisions, and lack of continuous delivery. Specific examples include “frameworks built internally 10 years ago” and “legacy AWS infrastructure with unused services.”
How does this affect developers?
The kitchen analogy to describe the reality of tech debt is a good example: If you run a restaurant and you only cook, don’t wash the dishes, don’t scrape the grill, and don’t clean the fridge, the marketing authority will soon shut down your piece of junk.
However, there is no oversight in software development. It is necessary to make the kitchen staff more aware of the conditions in the kitchen they are working on each day. If nothing is done, the kitchen will start to fail to produce edible meals. In general, you can convince decision makers that cleaning the kitchen is a more advantageous option in the long run; Or, update your resume and leave before the current kitchen burns down.
2. Low morale and job satisfaction
Technical debt hurts team morale and leads to excessive cognitive load. Moreover, managing a disgruntled team is not easy. Most people take pride in doing a good job and are rewarded for success. But if they have technical debt, they may feel dragged down or overwhelmed. The situation is even worse if concerns have been raised with management and there is no recourse. Eighty percent of Codehoy respondents indicated that their management was aware of technical debt: Specifically, 57 percent said their managers were aware but did not plan for it; Twenty-three percent of respondents said their manager knows but doesn’t care.
One respondent noted, “Management actively acknowledges this, and we even prioritize technical debt, but the technical debt item never makes it into the workflow because it’s never seen as important enough.” Another put it this way: “One of the strange things I’ve noticed is that our company is in financial trouble, which means solving technology debt is a lower priority than new features that might bring in more revenue. However, I think many of our problems are related to our technical debt (e.g., the system was downgraded over the weekend due to poor regulation). For whatever reason, new features continue to overcome problems that cost our users, and the technical debt continues to go unsolved.”
3. Brain drain
Technical debt is both a technical problem and a management problem. Happy developers are members of high-functioning teams, and if your developers aren’t satisfied, they’ll leave, taking their (undocumented) knowledge with them.
Technical debt is one of the reasons people leave or want to leave. Codehoy’s survey found that 50% of the developers surveyed were likely or very likely to leave their jobs because of technical debt. Another 27 percent said they had thought about it but weren’t sure. All in all, quite a few people may be swayed by attractive job offers from competitors. If the company is experiencing high developer turnover, technical debt can be a factor, especially for those who spend time fixing bugs in legacy code and miss out on more exciting projects.
4. Customer satisfaction declines
If technical debt leads to a mediocre product launch, there is a risk of a negative customer experience. Developers may be somewhat distant from the end user, but they will bear the brunt of the pagers and helpdesks when things go wrong. In addition, as the code becomes more complex, it takes longer for developers to release new features into production, which slows down overall production and delays updates, leading to lower customer satisfaction and ultimately a competitive disadvantage.
5. Legal consequences
Technical debt can have serious consequences when technology updates involve compliance with standards. It can lead to costly data breaches, fines and compliance penalties, and even litigation in areas such as healthcare and banking. In some cases, delays in mission-critical software can put software lives at risk.
6. Stifle creativity
Every minute spent on maintenance due to technical debt is a lost opportunity for innovative or value-added work. Accenture’s study of federated IT systems shows that technical debt and the resulting IT discontinuity hinder innovation, agility, and engineering speed. Eighty-three percent said technology debt severely limits their ability to innovate, 79 percent said it inhibits their ability to respond to change, and only 38 percent of respondents estimated the cost of repairing it. The accumulation of technical debt in legacy systems is a key obstacle to modernization.