Technical debt is a great metric to measure how much pressure and bad decisions from management are affecting the team, product, and overall business.
Technical debt is completely avoidable and unnecessary. In fact, from dozens of projects my teams inherited to course correct, we could see the total investment, cost of maintenance, and cost of ownership was on average 1.8x higher when compared to projects with zero technical debt and similar complexity and size.
Common justifications to adopt technical debt:
- A temporary solution to deliver something within a fixed timeline
- Time-to-market to beat the competition
- Minimal Viable Product
- Infrastructure direct costs
- Promise to pay it later
Accepting technical debt will inevitably lead to significant reinvestment in the future. This is also true even if there is a set limit to the amount of technical debt or a process to pay it at every iteration.
Proper Digital Ops practices - modern quality, continuous delivery, and evolutionary architecture can contribute to avoiding technical debt. However, embracing Agile and improving feature prioritization practices are the real game changers for better solutions that will not require re-engineering and re-investments in the future.
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