Architectural and Technical Debt

You may have read about technical debt in software development where there is a either a gap in what was promised to that what was delivered, or at a lower level the development team have taken a shortcut either deliberately through constraints in time or budget or simply due to a lower level of maturity.

Built in debt

On way we create architectural and technical debt is to get a little off course and you need to take a detour.

In many cases you cannot offer everything the organisation wants and need to make interim steps towards the target solution, but if this step means introducing work-arounds or making changes that you need to undo at a later date then this introduces debt. These are tactical not strategic changes.

As an example, imagine the user wished to automate the sending of marketing letters to the customer. This requirements is valuable and adds a lot of benefit, but you just don’t have the time to hit the immovable deadlines. You build a report to extract the data so this can be manually merged with a template to allow a user to generate and send these manually at the end of each day.

The report extract, template build, process and users role are all technical debt that at some point needs to be re-paid to deliver the target solution.

The total cost here is relatively easy to calculate – it is the remediation costs which are the cost of developing these tactical solution plus the technical/architectural debt which is:

• the cost of removing the tactical solution at a later date plus
• the cost of developing the strategic solution plus
• the cost of any tidy up work that is needed from the tactical solution

We should record the details of this debt (either in a log, or by adding an associated requirement/user story to the backlog linked to the tactical one) and mark it as such. If the project originally agreed to implement the requirement in full then the remediation cost should be removed from the budget or the benefits case adjusted by this amount. These steps are typically taken to add pressure on the projects to ‘do the right thing’

Un-maintained systems

One of the other ways that debt is incurred is by simply doing nothing. In many cases time is a friend that fixes all but not here. As the world changes, systems require changes. Technology needs updating, processes need to be monitored managed, people need to be constantly trained and data needs managing.

If any of this is left then debt is incurred and accumulates.

The Consequences

An ever increasing drag on the organisation – This debt has a similar effect to the bad financial debt that is a drag on the organisation, but unlike financial debt, it remains hidden and growing for many organisations that can at best, cause the business change to slow down and at worst, cause it to fail.

Change is hard – have you ever wondered why it can feel so hard to make even the smallest change?