The Gartner Application Development Advisory for 2012 strongly mandates abandoning waterfall, going Agile, and implementing a technical debt remediation program. This needs to be driven by the Product Owner and supported by management. But what is technical debt, and how can we manage it?
IEEE Software (Nov 2012) devotes a whole issue to this problem with many enlightening analyses and viewpoints. The point-counterpoint pages above show how to put a financial number on technical data. On the other hand the case is made that technical debt is more far reaching than any financial number and can lead to success or failure of products and companies.
Point: Technical Debt as Meaningful Metaphor for Code Quality by Israel Gat
Unlike financial debt, technical debt can't be calculated from history alone. Growth of financial debt as a function of time is determined by computing interest and adding dollars owed on older debts to newly taken ones. In contrast, the technical debt accrued by accepting a high level of complexity nine months ago is quite different from the technical debt accrued by quickly duplicating some blocks of code six months ago. when various kinds of technical debt are taken at different points in time, the grand total at a later point is hard to assess. The development team might still recall that nine months ago, it borrowed a week's worth of time on complexity, and more recently, a day through code duplication. However, between these two "loans" and sofware decay, will it take 6, 10, 20, or 50 days to pay back the debt? That;s the real question.
To find your current level of technical debt, you need to start with the current state of your code and dig deep: start with code analysis, look at quality deficits, determine the time to fix per deficit, determine the time to fix per deficit, aggregate the time to fix, and then aggregate the cost to fix. Once you monetize technical debt, any stakeholder can understand and appreciate its operational, financial, and business implications. A CFO will have no problem relating to a statement such as, "the technical debt on the project amounts to $500,000." Likewise, his or her peers in marketing, professional services, or customer support will easily assess what this level of technical debt means to their departments.
Counterpoint: A Useful Metaphor for Risk--Poorly Practiced by Christof Ebert
My own definition (of technical debt) is pretty simple: technical debt is the eventual consequence of poor engineering of a software product for short-term benefits that make the same work cost more to do later. Let's look to any industry case study.
In 1996, Netscape Navigator ruled the search engine market with a share of 80 percent; Microsoft's Internet Explorer held the remaining 20 percent. This should have been enough to make it a fat cash cow for decades to come, yet in 2002, Microsoft's market share jumped to 96 percent and Netscape's was just 2 percent. What happened? When founded in 1994, Netscape owned a wonderful and unique product for accessing the Internet. Engineers evolved it quickly but lost control--speed dominated engineering and quality, the code got worse with each new function, and nobody realized that they had accuulated a debt that couldn't be repaid. This brings us to our first lesson: make technical debt visible. Explorer's initial code also got out of control, but Microsoft took another direction--it opted to fully redesign Explorer, which delayed the product but eventually helped it dominate the market. Our second lesson: evaluate tradeoffs. Microsoft decided that a core architecture team, product management, and maintainability and portability where its top goals. In contrast, Netscape pushed Java into a new product but without a clear architecture and product design. Eventually the company disappeared. Our third lesson: systematically control technical debt.
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