A brief history

Last week I touched on Dealing with rapid change and I kinda got carried away and exceeded my self imposed 800 word limit. So the point of today’s blog is about capturing the technical debt and then how best to deal with it so you don’t end up in a situation where the service starts suffering because of tactical decisions made without suitable foresight.

So to summerise what technical debt is for those that did not read last weeks post (shame on you), Technical Debt is what you accrue when you have to make a change that does not head towards the overal goal but instead causes additional headaches for managing the environment or some how limits you in achieving the overal goal of a perfect system.

Capturing technical debt

My personal preference to tracking technical debt is a ticketing system, just create a way within that to easily identify what is technical debt and what is a normal task. You don’t have to use a ticketing system, you could just write it on paper or in a spreadsheet or what ever, the important thing is that you capture it with a reasonable amount of detail.

Avoid the temptation of filling the ticket with a lot of information, just put enough in it that explains what the problem is and why it needs to be fixed, if you have some suggestions on how it could be fixed add them to the ticket but don’t worry about saying “this is the solution” that can be done when the ticket is actioned.

Try and make sure you capture the following as a rule of thumb:

• What is the issue?
• Why is it an issue?
• Any future tasks that are dependant on it
• How long the task will take
• A rough priority

These things will help prioritise the task when it comes to the planning the next set of tasks / projects that need to be actioned, but it doesn’t really help it get prioritised. Why? because it will never be the focus of the business to do the boring work that makes it stable unless there are issues or it has to be done as dependancy of another task.

Actioning technical debt

As I pointed out before, the business will never prioritise the technical debt unless there is a real issue for it to do so, service stability or dependancy on another task. This is a fact of life, and if you’ve found your self in this situation getting frustrated about all the hundreds of days of backlog tasks of technical debt that is accruing, panic no more.

As I pointed out above, the business will never want to do the technical debt unless there is good cause to do so, so the point of capturing the tickets with the right information is that the dependancies are clear, the outcomes of not doing it are clear, this makes it easier to discuss it as a business requirement. That is not enough though, you will get some tasks done but you will not be decreasing the technical debt it will continue to increase.

You need to create an environment in your immediate team and the extended team that understand why the technical debt needs to be actioned. This will be easier to do than convincing the whole business as to why it is important. Once you have the buy-in of the teams everyone will hopefully understand why it is important to keep the technical debt to a minimum. This will help it take a higher priority when it comes to scheduling tasks and help reduce the technical debt in the long run, it would also be a good idea as a group to identify an amount of technical debt that as a group you are happy to live with, this can be calculated on the amount of effort days required to deliver each task. This is a sure fire way of getting technical debt actioned and will help ensure that it remains at a level that is sustainable.

There’s always going to be a risk that you’ve tried all of the above and you’ve still not gotten anywhere, the technical debt keeps rising and the environment continues to get more and more complicated to work within. Simple, do not worry about it, you did what you were meant to, you raised the issues, you pointed it out to your boss, you can kick back and relax, maybe even take deep joy in the moment when it all fails and someone asks why and you just point out the years worth of technical debt that has ground your system to a halt. In short, it’s not your problem, it’s your bosses, you just need to make sure you capture it and raise it.

Summary

Technical debt is bad, if you’re not aware of it you need to be, you need to have a mechanism for dealing with it and if you don’t your systems will grind to a halt and you will probably be one of those companies that re-builds the entire infrastructure every 3-5 years because the technical debt was so large that the environment was unmanageable.