Monday Morning CTO

Introduction

In our journey through the world of technical debt, we’ve set a solid foundation. We’ve defined what technical debt is, its types, and sources, and explored the intricacies of identifying, assessing, and quantifying it. Now, it’s time to turn our attention to the heart of our software operations: the development process. 

The development process is where ideas transform into software, where the abstract meets the concrete. Yet, it’s also a fertile ground for the accumulation of technical debt. Not addressing technical debt in the development process is akin to ignoring the check engine light on your car’s dashboard. It might not affect your driving in the short-term, but over time, it could lead to serious engine damage and expensive repairs.

So, how can we integrate technical debt management into our development processes? What measures can we take to prevent the accumulation of technical debt? And how can we plan for it without stifling innovation and efficiency? In this post, we’ll delve into these questions, providing you with practical strategies and insights to ensure the sustainability of your software projects.

In the spirit of transparency, our goal here isn’t to eliminate technical debt entirely—that’s an unrealistic aim. Instead, our focus is on effective management and control of technical debt. We’re about to embark on a journey to embed awareness and proactive handling of technical debt into every stage of our development process. By the end of this post, you’ll have the knowledge and tools you need to transform your development process into a lean, debt-aware operation that values long-term sustainability as much as innovation and delivery speed.

All technical debt is not bad – but unmanaged technical debt is.

Join us as we delve into the intricacies of addressing technical debt in the development process, a critical aspect of software development that can no longer be ignored.

Understanding the Agile Development Process and Sources of Technical Debt

To address technical debt effectively, we must first comprehend the terrain on which it’s most likely to arise: the development process.

Agile methodologies, such as Scrum, have reshaped how we build software, favouring iterative, incremental development that delivers continual value to users. However, this approach also introduces new ways that technical debt can accumulate if not carefully managed.

Here are the key stages of the Agile development process and the potential sources of technical debt within each:

1. Product Backlog Creation: This initial stage involves defining and prioritizing user stories that describe the features, improvements, and fixes the software should deliver. Vague user stories can lead to ‘requirements debt’, where misunderstandings or shortcuts during development give rise to future problems. It is critical to make sure the user stories are complete and well defined and that the Product Owner is available to help resolve any uncertainties during the sprint. For work not well understood, use spike tickets to resolve uncertainty before proceeding.

Vague, poorly defined requirements build in technical debt before development even starts

2. Sprint Planning: During this stage, teams select a set of user stories to work on in the next sprint (typically a 2-4 week period). The desire to deliver as many features as possible can result in over-commitment, leading to rushed development and compromised code quality. As discussed below, make sure to take a balanced approach to sprint planning.

3. Sprint Execution: This is where user stories become functional software. Technical debt can quickly accumulate here, especially if there’s pressure to meet sprint deadlines, a lack of adherence to coding standards, and insufficient code reviews. Additional sources of debt include:

•    Maintenance Debt: Neglecting routine maintenance, such as upgrading libraries or updating infrastructure, can lead to outdated systems that hinder performance and expose security vulnerabilities.
•    Documentation Debt: Insufficient documentation makes it harder for team members to understand the software, slowing down development and increasing the risk of errors.
•    Testing Debt: Insufficient testing due to time constraints can allow bugs to slip into production, impacting software quality and user experience.
•    Code Debt: Neglecting to allocate time for meaningful refactoring—the process of improving existing code without changing its behaviour—can lead to a complex, hard-to-understand codebase.

4. Sprint Review & Retrospective: Here, the team showcases the software increment to stakeholders and reflects on their process. Ignoring these stages can lead to ‘process debt’, where ineffective practices continue unaddressed, leading to poor quality output or slower progress.

5. Product Increment Deployment: The software increment is made available to users. Debt can be incurred if deployment practices are inefficient or the software’s interaction with the production environment isn’t thoroughly tested.

Understanding the Agile process and where technical debt can arise is the first step in effectively managing it. By integrating technical debt considerations into each stage of the Agile development process, we can prevent its accumulation and ensure the long-term health and sustainability of our software projects. In the next section, we’ll delve into specific strategies for doing just that.

Balancing New Development, Ongoing Maintenance, and Debt Repayment in the Agile Process: A Financial Portfolio Analogy

In the Agile process, managing technical debt is akin to managing a financial portfolio (here is a good discussion of this analogy). The resources—your team’s time, your budget—are your income, which must be wisely allocated to cover ongoing maintenance, new development, and debt reduction. 

Here’s how we can approach this resource management challenge:

1. Product Backlog Creation & Sprint Planning: As we create user stories and plan our sprints, we must understand that each user story not only represents a new feature but also potential sources of technical debt. Consider the necessary resources to develop the feature, maintain ongoing quality, and address potential debt. In addition, not all capacity should be committed to “new” work. Remember to invest in avoiding and paying down debt. Where a decision is made to incur debt in order to achieve some strategic goal, that decision should be transparent, conscious and carefully considered.

Where a decision is made to incur debt in order to achieve some strategic goal, that decision should be transparent, conscious and carefully considered.

To balance these needs, we can split our resource allocation into three categories:

• New Development (Investing for the Future): This covers resources dedicated to building new features and functionality. Like investing money in stocks, bonds, or real estate for future growth, developing new features increases our product’s value and competitive edge.
• Ongoing Maintenance and Debt Prevention (Expenses): Allocate resources for tasks aimed at maintaining the quality of our codebase and preventing new technical debt. This is akin to managing routine expenses in our financial life. It includes comprehensive testing, code reviews, updating documentation, performing routine maintenance like upgrading libraries and infrastructure—these are our ongoing “expenses,” necessary to keep our software running smoothly.
• Debt Repayment (Debt Reduction): Dedicate a portion of resources to addressing known technical debt. Similar to setting aside funds to repay financial debts, this involves tasks like refactoring code, updating outdated libraries, or improving inefficient processes—paying down our “principal” to reduce our “interest.”

2. Sprint Execution: During the sprint, continue to balance these three categories of resource investment. Monitor progress closely to ensure that maintenance, debt prevention, and repayment tasks aren’t being overlooked or rushed due to the pressure of new feature development.

3. Sprint Review & Retrospective: After each sprint, evaluate how well you balanced resource allocation. Did you maintain ongoing quality effectively? Were you able to reduce existing debt? Did new feature development progress as planned? Use these insights to adjust your approach in the next sprint. Preferably, there are metrics in place to not only measure velocity, but what portion of the velocity is in each area (investment, maintenance, debt repayment).

It is critical to take a conscious, balanced approach to managing and paying down technical debt.

Just like managing a financial portfolio, the goal is to strike the right balance. If we over-invest in new development at the expense of ongoing maintenance and debt reduction, we risk accumulating crippling technical debt. On the other hand, if we neglect new development, our product might fail to deliver fresh value to users and lose ground to competitors.

This balancing act is not a one-time effort but a continuous process of evaluation and adjustment. As your product evolves, your team grows, and your business priorities shift, your approach to managing resources will need to adapt. By maintaining this dynamic balance, we can ensure our software product remains competitive, sustainable, and adaptable to change, all while keeping technical debt in check.

Prioritizing Technical Debt in the Backlog: The Pitfall of Neglecting Debt While Investing

As a Product Owner, your role is akin to a financial manager, not just for an individual, but for a company. You balance the addition of new features (investments for growth), with routine maintenance and debt prevention (operational expenses), and addressing technical debt (debt reduction). However, the allure of investing in new features can often overshadow the less glamorous task of managing technical debt. But, just like a financial manager cannot ignore debt while making massive investments, you too must give due importance to managing technical debt. Here’s how you can incorporate this into your product backlog:

1. Identify and Track Technical Debt (Debt Accounting): Just like a financial manager must keep a precise record of all outstanding debts, you too must ensure all known technical debt is captured and visible in your product backlog. This record-keeping, achieved through collaboration with your team during Agile ceremonies like retrospectives and reviews, prevents technical debt from becoming a hidden liability.

2. Prioritize Technical Debt (Debt Management): Debts vary in nature and severity, both in finance and code. Prioritize technical debt in your backlog based on its impact on your product, similar to how a financial manager would prioritize debts based on their impact on the company’s financial health.

3. Estimate the Effort (Debt Repayment Plan): Just like budgeting for debt repayment, facilitate your team’s estimation of the effort required to resolve each technical debt item. This aids in planning and resource allocation for the upcoming sprints, ensuring your team’s capacity is not overstretched.

4. Include Technical Debt in Sprint Planning (Balanced Financial Planning): During sprint planning, balance the focus between new feature development and technical debt items. This is similar to a financial manager ensuring a balance between investments and debt repayments. Allocate a portion of the team’s capacity for addressing technical debt, making it an integral part of the sprint’s commitment.

5. Monitor and Reassess Regularly (Financial Health Check): Just as a financial manager regularly reviews financial plans to adjust to changes, you too should reassess your technical debt situation. Are you making progress in reducing your technical debt? Are there recurring sources of debt that indicate a need for changes in your development practices?

Don’t let pressure for new features force you to ignore technical debt!

By embracing this approach, you can avoid the pitfall of prioritizing new feature development at the expense of managing technical debt. Just as over-investing while neglecting debt repayment can lead to financial instability, focusing solely on new features while ignoring technical debt can lead to unsustainable code and compromised product quality. Remember, a healthy, high-performing product requires balanced investment, operational excellence, and effective debt management.

Using Tools to Manage Technical Debt

There are numerous tools available that can aid in the active management of technical debt. These tools approach tech debt by analyzing the source code to identify hotspots or helping software developers track issues in the code editor, and also allow project managers and product owners to understand how they are spending their resources. Let’s discuss some of them and their roles in managing technical debt.

In managing technical debt, several types of tools are commonly used, each with its strengths and weaknesses. The key to successful management is often a combination of these tools, tailored to the needs of the specific project or organization, and rolled-out in alignment with process improvements.

1. Code Analysis and Static Analysis Tools: These are used to automatically analyze the source code and identify potential areas of technical debt. Examples include SonarQube, Checkstyle, and Closure Compiler. Some tools, like Designite, can even detect “design smells”, which are indicative of poor design decisions that could lead to technical debt. However, these tools typically focus on code/test debts and may not effectively address design/architecture debts. They are also often limited to identifying smaller pieces of technical debt and may not provide sufficient context for understanding larger, more complex issues.

2. Project Management Tools: Jira is a familiar example of a project management tools that can be used to track and manage issues related to technical debt. However, these tools primarily identify rather than measure technical debt, and engineers may find them challenging to use due to context-switching between the tool and the code. Nevertheless, extensions are available to enhance the use of these tools, and they can still serve as valuable assets in managing technical debt.

3. Technical Debt Tools: This is a newer category of tools specifically designed to manage technical debt. They aim to make technical debt easy to track, spot, and fix. Stepsize is an example of this type of tool, which allows engineers to track technical debt issues directly from their code editor and integrates with other tools like Jira for better management and prioritization of issues.

4. Artificial Intelligence Tools: Tools like CollabGPT  (also from Stepsize) use AI to improve workflow and project management by providing memory of tasks, concise recaps, and practical advice based on events in tools like Jira, GitHub, and Slack. This can help keep teams coordinated and focused on efficient decision-making, which indirectly contributes to managing technical debt. Of course there are new AI-based tools popping up almost faster than you can read about them.

In using these tools, it’s important to note that managing technical debt involves several steps, including identifying, measuring, prioritizing, monitoring, documenting, communicating, preventing, and repaying the debt. Different tools may be more effective at different stages, and using them in combination is often the best approach. It is also essential to note that buying a new tool will not fix your processes or culture, which must be addressed before investing in shiny tools.

Conclusion

Addressing technical debt is a critical part of any software development process. It requires active management and regular attention, much like personal finance. By integrating technical debt management into the Agile/Scrum process, investing the right resources, and utilizing the right tools, we can effectively manage and reduce this debt, leading to healthier and more sustainable software development.

One of the most challenging aspects of dealing with technical debt is that it’s not always visible. It lurks in the codebase, much like an iceberg, where the majority of it is hidden beneath the surface. This is where a culture of continuous improvement and transparency comes into play. Encouraging team members to speak up about areas where technical debt may be accumulating, and providing them with the tools and processes to do so effectively, is crucial.

We’ve discussed the role of the Product Owner in managing technical debt, but it’s important to emphasize that this responsibility extends to the entire team. Developers, testers, designers – everyone involved in the product development process has a part to play. Developers should strive for clean, maintainable code; testers should ensure high test coverage; designers should work towards intuitive and maintainable designs. This collective effort will go a long way in preventing and managing technical debt.

The use of tools is also paramount in handling technical debt. These tools provide a systematic way to identify, measure, and monitor technical debt. They can help visualize debt in the codebase, making it easier to understand and manage. But remember, tools are just enablers. They facilitate the process, but the primary responsibility lies with the team to use these tools effectively and take appropriate actions based on the insights provided.

The key to managing technical debt lies in striking a balance

The key to managing technical debt lies in striking a balance. It’s about balancing the need to deliver new features with the necessity to maintain a healthy codebase. It’s about balancing the urgency of immediate business needs with the long-term sustainability of the software. This balancing act is not easy, and it requires a nuanced understanding of both the business and technical aspects of the product. But with careful planning, open communication, and a proactive approach, it’s definitely achievable.

As we move ahead, let’s keep the following next steps in mind:

1. Integrating Technical Debt Management into Planning: Ensure that technical debt management is a part of your regular planning process. This includes sprint planning, backlog grooming, and roadmap discussions.

2. Regularly Assessing and Prioritizing Technical Debt: Make it a routine to assess and prioritize technical debt. Use a combination of qualitative assessments and quantitative measures to do so.

3. Investing in Training and Tools: Invest in training your team on the concept and implications of technical debt. Equip them with the right tools to identify, measure, and monitor technical debt.

4. Emphasizing a Culture of Quality and Continuous Improvement: Cultivate a culture where quality is valued and continuous improvement is the norm. Encourage team members to take ownership of their work and be proactive in addressing technical debt.

In our next post, we’ll delve deeper into these next steps. We’ll provide a detailed guide on how to integrate technical debt management into your planning process, how to assess and prioritize technical debt, and how to foster a culture that actively addresses technical debt. We’ll also review some of the top tools in the industry for managing technical debt and provide tips on how to effectively use them.

Managing technical debt may seem like a daunting task, but remember, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. It’s about making consistent strides towards a healthier codebase, and every small step counts.