The idea of technical debt has become ubiquitous in our industry. It started as a metaphor to help business stakeholders understand the compounding cost of shortcuts in the code. Then, from there, it grew to define perhaps the foundation of trade-offs in the tech world.
You’d find yourself hard pressed, these days, to find a software shop that has never heard of tech debt. It seems that just about everyone can talk in the abstract about dragons looming in their code, portending an eventual reckoning. “We need to do something about our tech debt,” has become the rallying cry for “we’re running before we walk.”
As with its fiscal counterpart, when all other factors equal, having less tech debt is better than having more. Technical debt creates drag on the pace of new feature deliver until someone ‘repays’ it. And so shops constantly grapple with the question, “how can we reduce our tech debt?”
I could easily write a post where I listed the 3 or 5 or 13 or whatever ways to reduce tech debt. First, I’d tell you to reduce problematic coupling. Then, I’d tell you to stop it with the global variables. You get the idea.
But today, I want to do something a bit different. I want to talk about the one thing that every company can do to reduce tech debt. I consider it to be sort of a step zero.
Continue reading The One Thing Every Company Can Do to Reduce Technical Debt