Technical Debt Assessment
Sample use case
Company A
- Incuring tech debt faster than we are able to resolve
- tight delivery timelines and limited engineering skills
- allocation of team resources are contributing factor
- tech debt is impeding ability to deliver
What to do
- Audit tech components and determine extent
- Identify the characteristics of the debt and determine severity by how many characteristics are pressent
- identify key areas highest severity to address
Lessons
- Avoid touching high risk systems
- Simplify the tech stack w/ current engineering capabilities
- Devops Automation
Characteristics
Considerations
- Inconsistency - multiple implementations, inconsistently applied coding patterns
- Low Code Quality - not testable, tests not implemented
- Anti patterns -
- Highly fragile - Components brwak easily when new changes are introduced
- Highly complex- hard to trace and debug
- tightly coupled components
- high duplication
Non Debt
- future planned capabilities
- manual interventions
- immature components
- Missing capabilities
Impact
- longer time to market
- increased cost to maintain
- decrease ability to scale
- degraded developer experience