How's Your Tech Debt?

The term "tech debt" has been around for a number of years, and resurfaces periodically. The early usage was a way to talk about the cost of short-sighted programming, bugs, and badly architected solutions. The metaphor gave programmers a financial analogy for contemplating the value of good programming practices, and for non-programmers to appreciate the need for plenty of time to do development well. If you don't do it well the first time, you will need to go back and patch it up, creating more potential break points and incurring increasing tech debt.

Clearly, this is a micro-view of tech debt. If you zoom out a bit, you start seeing debt in not just the quality of the starting point, but also in the ability to keep up with change over time. Eventually, even the best programming needs to be retired and replaced. Stepping back, you start looking beyond programming, to the quality of the product's design and architecture, and the infrastructure and hardware it is tied to.

Tech debt comes from:

• Poor programming practices followed by patches
• Not keeping your assets maintained
• Isolating from the rest of the world
• Not keeping up with universal trends

Over ten years ago,Y2K forced the greatest surge of eliminating technical debt, of course at a huge financial and operational cost. Now, that "new" software and infrastructure is nearing fifteen years in place, and it is incurring its own technical debt for its own reasons. In particular, the EAI that emerged during that Y2K time period was badly needed, but may have been an afterthought for ERPs, hastily architected, and starting out with a tech debt burden.

What about the next fifteen years? You've mastered SOA, but will there be something new that sends it the way of EAI? We're just getting off the ground with SaaS, but maybe in that time the pendulum will begin to swing back to new takes on old trends.

If you look at the dimensions that are generating tech debt, you'll see:

• Quality
• Time
• Trends

Quality is clear; time inevitably invites new requirements, new infrastructures, as the old age out, forcing change on the other old-timer components; trends are a bit more insidious.

What do you do when the tech debt increases at an unsustainable rate? At that point of no return, you replace it. That point comes earlier if you have not kept up with basic investments in maintenance. It's inevitable that you will need to reformulate your strategy and tactics and get a fresh start.

How is your tech debt doing? Is it getting more expensive to keep the status quo than it would to replace or stepwise replace what you have? One of the key technologies you need to look at that can give immediate benefit in managing your tech debt is Agile Integration Software.