If you have tech debt, then you must explore this silent danger eating your software out, calculate it precisely and express it in simple language that can be easily understood. There are different flavors of tech debt, and it affects the quality. You must identify these poor and dirty codes and address them at the right time. But first, you have to calculate the quantum and make it understand to people from both technical and non-technical fields. It is the first step to successfully and efficiently manage your technical debt so that it does not choke your organization gradually.
The Numeric Data
Numbers tell many things. If you research for the numeric data of tech debt and conduct an analysis, you will find it easy to address the problem with ease. All these metrics are simple, very objective and easy to understand. It will help you to take the right and informed decision if you are realistic and have the accurate numbers. It also gives you a variety of choices, saves your time, effort and cost as well. Any miscalculations made in the report which is hard to intercept will lead to miscommunications, misjudgment and convey a wrong message to the customers who have all the right to know where they are putting their money.
Best Way To Express
You must know the best way to express tech debt without using any jargon, so that other understands it. There are a variety of terms used for code quality metrics like branch coverage, cyclomatic complexity, and unwanted dependency cycles. You can check online to know more of such jargons. But most of the people will not understand them unless it is presented by a single reference number, though every cause for tech debt can be expressed in one or more metrics. It will make more sense to both technical as well as non-technical people.
Compare With Financial Debt
As it is also a debt just like any financial debts, it must also be treated and compared to any other financial debt. When you go to a bank to take a loan, there are few steps that are followed. First, you discuss with the representative to find out your requirement, ability and affordability to pay it back on time with interest, sign a loan agreement, spend wisely and finally make arrangements to repay it back. It is the same process that must and is followed in case of dealing with tech debt. If you express it in numbers and say that for ‘x’ percent of debt the development must spend ‘y’ working days to work on it. This will be easily understood.
The Right Approach
Approaching tech debt with proper metrics is the best way. The development team will now calculate by the given quantum of debt the time required to remove duplicate codes, decrease complexity and do refactoring to eliminate tech debt. The non-technical team can also keep the figure in mind and remind the developers to spend ‘y’ working days as suggested. It will also help to compute the time required, cost and effort required to improve your codes. You can browse net to learn more on the topic. You can even look for information on credit card debt and how to get out of it and make things easy for you.