How to be technical debt thrifty and make some operational friends

A quickly delivered IT project almost always incurs some technical debt burden. Time and quality are rarely close siblings. The servicing of technical debt usually involves compatibility issues, security gaps, performance issues, etc. All of these cost and they rarely come out of the budget of the original project team, most often they silently drain the budget of “business as usual”.

So how do you get to an acceptable compromise between project time, project quality, initial project cost and ongoing technical debt servicing? Read on for some top tips.

Involve business operations at the start, middle and end of a project.

When the folk who have to maintain business operations after the project has concluded are involved early then the longer term maintenance costs are reduced. Include the mitigation, management and pay down of technical debt as a line item in the project plan and assign business operations folk to be in charge of that line item. Such an approach increases ownership, project quality and reigns in scope creep.

Plan judiciously, budget pragmatically and execute with focus.

Having included the line item in the project plan for mitigating, managing and paying down the technical debt now allocate an actual budget to it. The project management and project teams need to be close friends who must be prepared to tell each other harsh truths for mutual benefit. Deficiencies in requirements, vision, technical risk and process need to be flattened out before the project starts.

Focus on the achievable and measure your achievements

Beware of time saving design shortcuts that paint you into a corner. Think about performance, scalability and deployment at the outset, understand end user needs but also their need for future change. Reign in the large functional sprints that take time to design and test and go for smaller solutions that can be developed, tested and adopted without the need for upheaval. Bake the quality into small buns rather than big soggy cakes. Use open source code analysis tools to rate project deliverables in the same way as reading and grammar tools work for documents.

Think of the project timescales as a relay race.

All project plans begin with an apex of ignorance, a pinnacle of pressure and a magnum opus of optimism. The traditional approach to minimise technical debt is to insist on ever more detailed specifications, ever tighter contracts and the eventual /inevitable ditching of poor quality functionality in order to deliver. A better approach is to manage expectations intelligently with looser plans with delivery bay windows rather than rigid delivery dates.

Self aware agility not a “just friggin’ do it” anarchy.

No project is ever truly finished and no project is ever perfect within its lifetime. Focus on the discipline of the small steps involving, collaboration, organisation, cross functional design and regular deployments that produce ripples rather than tsunamis.

Move with the times.

Starting a project based on legacy applications, outdated platforms and disparate technologies is a sure way to start climbing a technical debt ramp. Your project will take time to implement and will have a defined lifespan. During both of these phases, real maintenance costs will increase. Speed, scale, security, integration and automation will all need managing by an ever diminishing legacy talent pool. Sticking with the tried and trusted often delivers average at best performance and kicks the balloon payment of technical debt down the road for another project to inherit.

If you don’t use it drop it.

Catalogue the project scope and correlate its actual or expected usage. If it is less used then rather than upgrade or reinvent it, just say no and drop it. The time to do this is at the outset and not when resources have already been committed. Don’t re-inter long dead features in fresh earth.

Watch the road, read the signs and pay attention to the lights on the dashboard.

· “Manual changes ahead”

· “Low documentation warning light”

· “Welcome to Poor Integrationsville – Popn 0”

These are all signs that project road trip is clocking up technical debt. Take steps to reduce the rate of debt increase and create a map of the debt mines which have already been planted.

In summary

Sometimes a little technical debt is warranted when speed is of the essence but it can quickly build up and that attempt at the land speed record can become a free weight lifting competition. Lighten your load by dropping off perfection. Just save that extra horsepower for when you really need to get out of Dodge.