Seven Strategies for Technical Debt

  Agile   Applications Delivery   Cost Management   Governance   Information Technology   Risk Management   Schedule Management   Scheduling  

Have years of haphazardly designed and piecemealed systems paralyzed your organization? Are costs rising and customer responsiveness falling? Do your teams complain about how hard it is to make simple changes? These are all telltale signs of an all-too common problem: technical debt. As its name suggests,technical debt refers to the tradeoffs teams make with respect to maintainability and adaptability in order to meet release dates. After a series of seemingly small tradeoffs for the sake of speed (often at the request of management), teams incur technical debt that makes future changes costlier and riskier. This hidden cost--when left uncontrolled--can force organizations to face costly decisions of when to re-write or replace systems because their maintenance costs are too high.

Fortunately, this fate is avoidable--but only for organizations that make a commitment to investing in technical debt repayment. This article introduces you to technical debt, including common symptoms of organizations suffering under technical debt. You'll learn the basic steps to set up a repayment plan, the common causes of technical debt and effective strategies for paying it down.

What is Technical Debt?
Ward Cunningham first coined the term in the early 1990s (as described in this video). Although there are many definitions of technical debt, the three that I like most include:

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