In reality, financial debt may come handy in purchasing necessities or paying rent or mortgage, especially when one is struggling to make both ends meet. Financial debt may sometimes work to one’s advantage, but may also be a cause of problem when left unchecked. In the same manner, tech debt may be beneficial but may also pause major danger for software engineering and development firms.
Deal With It Like Financial Debt
You must deal with tech debt the same way you would financial debt as they both have the same cause and effects. In tech debt metaphor, it is the result of a quick and dirty way of coding process which is similar to financial debt where you behave impulsively and spend on things without much thinking. Like financial debts, tech debts also result in payments of interest which are in the form of extra effort given for the reworking, refactoring and addressing of the faulty codes. It is also the time and effort that you have to give for the future development that you have to make to eliminate any further quick and dirty designing.
The Human Tendency
When you moralize about debt, as is the human tendency to do so, it affects the engineers as well. You may come across many code owners who blame their development team who incur tech debt to be sloppy, unskilled and irresponsible and regard tech debt to be a bad thing to exist in code. It is also human to decide that you will pay off the interest of tech debt and continue to do so every month or you can simply pay down the principle by quick refactoring of the faulty design into a better one. You gain a lot regarding reduced interest in the future by paying off the principal amount, however, costly it may be.
Debt Is Highly Valuable
In the real world situation debt is highly valuable and it is necessary to pay it off on time. You must apply the same technique in paying off tech debt much like you would do to find the best way to pay off credit card debts. In paying off tech debts, the lean and agile techniques reduce the negative impacts and increase the positive effects and it all depends on your willingness to pay it off to keep it within manageable proportions. Consolidating credit card debt is a wise move as you will find it useful and beneficial. Click here to learn more.
Deal With Tech Debt Wisely
There are teams and code owners who take tech debt for wrong reasons unaware of the future consequences. There are examples of several legacy codes that become entirely swamped by refactoring the past mistakes made in the code. If you deal with tech debt wisely, then you will see that there are more benefits to it than just interest payments. You can use it for experimentation, as investment in different processes, and as means to increase the leverage of product development.
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