Expert knowledge for digital decisions
What is technical debt?
Short answer
Where it comes from
- Time pressure: 'First make it work, clean up later'
- Requirements that have changed without the structure being updated
- Missing tests that make clean-up risky
- Dependencies that have not been updated
Not every technical debt is a mistake. Delivering something quickly before a trade show can be economically sound.
How it manifests itself
- Small changes take unexpectedly long
- Every adjustment breaks something else
- New developers need a long time to get up to speed
- Updates are postponed because they are risky
When you hear 'this has historically grown,' that is the professional term for it.
How to keep it under control
Make it visible. Clean-up tasks should be on the same list as new features, not in a separate folder nobody reads.
Continuously pay it off. A fixed portion of every time period – for example, every tenth task – is dedicated to clean-up. This prevents large-scale overhauls.
Plan for updates. Dependencies become outdated regardless of whether you are working on the system.
The tipping point
When a small change costs more than the original construction of the affected part, the debt is higher than the value. Then it makes sense to refurbish – and in rare cases, to build anew.
Key facts
- Image
- Like a loan – with interest on every change
- Handling
- Make it visible and continuously pay it off
Sources
All external claims are backed by traceable sources.- 01