To be able to create a strategy for dealing with technical debt, managing IT executives must first gain full understanding of it and how is impacting their organisation’s ability to innovate and grow. Quality Clouds is the perfect solution to easily provide such visibility and understanding framework for all your cloud Applications.
CLOUD FIRST
The most efficient step forward reducing technical debt is going cloud/SAAS, which may shed the Infrastructure technical debt in the means of a) adjusted costs per operations realised and b) increased time to provision new capabilities. With the infrastructure technical debt properly addressed going cloud, there is a need for looking after the Application and Architecture compounded technical debt of the new cloud infrastructure, this is where Quality Clouds provides valuable insights.
The following Quality Clouds Applications dashboard provides a meaningful rendering of technical debt allowing to:
- Provide visibility of the cloud Applications.
- Ability to identify the most critical or over configured Applications.
- Ability to assess and quantify the cost of remediating.
Quality Clouds helps to anticipate future technical debt by providing an automated push approach to review all cloud Applications before going live into Production. In the example, Development teams are advised on the volume of technical debt introduced into their new release.
It is important to understand that the absolute value of the Technical Debt should be taken as a general indicator, not as a hard number which indicates with a high level of precision the effort required to bring the instance to an issue-free state. This is due mainly to the fact that the Technical Debt indicator considers only development time.
Overhead in terms of technical and architectural analysis, code reviews, testing and release management processes are not included, and these can be quite significant. Also, depending on your business requirements two issues of the same nature (which contribute equally to the Technical Debt indicator) may take significantly different time to resolve.
Even with these caveats in mind, using the Quality Clouds Technical Debt evolution indicator, Release Management teams would be able to negotiate what would be acceptable and how the remediation framework should be properly defined and followed by development teams.
The remediation framework should address the following questions, not limited to, of the technical debt managament strategy:
- How do you segregate your existing cloud applications to the new.
- How do you baseline per application.
- What is your development work-force / vendor commitment.
- What ruleset can you adopt or build.
- What decisions you need to revisit to continuously eliminate or minimise technical debt.