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What is technical debt?
Technical debt is a term used in software development to describe the consequences of making trade-offs between short-term and long-term solutions. In software development, technical debt is incurred when a team chooses to use an expedient or shortcut solution to meet immediate needs, rather than taking the time to develop a more robust and scalable solution. Risk rise in different areas of software development, such as architecture, design, coding, and testing.
In the short term, taking on technical debt can help teams deliver software faster or meet a deadline. However, risk accumulates over time and can result in increased maintenance costs, decreased productivity, and decreased quality of the software. This can lead to issues such as bugs, crashes, and security vulnerabilities.
Technical debt is often seen as a metaphorical debt that accrues interest over time, similar to financial debt. The longer technical debt remains unaddressed, the more expensive and time-consuming it becomes to fix. Technical debt can be managed through regular maintenance, refactoring, and by making a deliberate effort to reduce its accumulation.
How technical debt impacts functionality and metrics
According to Concern for enterprise organizations, 75% of respondents reported that they have moderate to high levels of technical debt in their applications. This risk can be particularly problematic for platforms like ServiceNow and Salesforce, which are commonly used for enterprise-level applications that have complex workflows and a large number of out-of-the-box features.
In addition, risk can have a significant impact on end-users and business processes. A study by IBM found that technical debt can increase the likelihood of system crashes, downtime, and data errors, all of which can lead to lost productivity and revenue. The study also noted that addressing risk can improve software quality and reduce the likelihood of future issues, leading to long-term cost savings.
The prevalence of technical debt in enterprise-level applications, and the high cost of addressing it, highlight the need for developers and organizations to prioritize good software design and coding practices from the outset. By doing so, they can avoid accumulating technical debt and ensure that their applications are reliable, efficient, and scalable.
Solution: How to measure and manage
Quality Clouds provides a 360-degree quality solution helping both developers and application owners manage the governance and removal of technical debt simply and practically, no matter the type of risk accumulated.
These solutions include support for developers while they are coding, helping prevent code quality issues at source, and the most efficient approach. We also provide code scans for checking best practice has been applied retrospectively, this is helpful to de-risk inherited implementations especially when the amount of technical debt is unknown.
When integrated into a company’s SDLC, we provide the capability to apply Quality Gates to developed code to ensure that where technical debt has been accepted by the business, it is managed with the appropriate sign-offs and controls.
Quality Clouds’ arsenal of risk solutions provides customers with the ability to identify risks and prevent any issues. By tackling both historical and new technical debt with these cutting-edge solutions, customers maximize their SaaS platform investment and get the most out of their development resources.
Dave Osman is a technology executive with over a decade of experience in various leadership roles. At Quality Clouds, he is the VP of Customer Outcomes based in London, where he helps customers to drive quality and efficiency across their Salesforce, ServiceNow and Microsoft 365 environments.
Prior to this, he was the Senior Vice President of Engineering, Packaged Apps at Tricentis and the Head of Delivery (ServiceNow practice UKIIMEA) at DXC Technology. He also worked at TESM, a company he helped build, as CTO of the ServiceNow Service partner, focusing on implementing/re-platforming ServiceNow for enterprise-scale Finance and Life Science organizations.
Dave has also worked as the Director of Service Management at Credit Suisse and served as the VP Application Development at ServiceNow, where he was responsible for the development of all applications across the platform, working for Fred Luddy. Starting with a small team, he continued the development of the ITSM and ITOM apps suites and delivered apps in new areas such as GRC, ITBM, Field Services, Asset Management, and Financials. During this time he also managed ServiceNow's systems used to manage and support all customer instances.
