#2 How much tech debt do we have, and how much is it costing us annually?
From the Series, 7 Questions Board Members Should Be Asking
Let’s start by defining tech debt.
Traditional Definition: prioritizing speedy delivery over good code.
Jen’s Definition: prioritizing the speed of delivery above all other work, almost always including critical tasks, resulting in consistently accumulating backlogs of work and growing costs.
The tech debt that builds up can include rework, recode, or refactor, along with slower and harder maintenance for infrastructure, including the speed to patch and protect. At the end of the day, all this delayed work builds tech debt that must be paid down at some point.
Prioritizing the delivery speed also means you’re prioritizing delivery over the quality of the output. And that, in turn, can affect your customers. On the internal side of the coin, it tends to mean that the future includes slower delivery, not faster, as well as increased costs and time to maintain. It’s like the attic or the garage; we all typically prolong cleaning it out, because it’s not as fun as a new thing that we want to do. But the fact of the matter is, it accumulates. And the more you have, the harder it is to modernize.
Frankly, tech debt costs the company the customer, talent, and innovation. Yet it can be quantified and reduced, so we must start by asking how much we have. Then we need to manage it just like a budget item.
Don’t just take my word for it:
In 2017 “52% of engineers believed that technical debt negatively affected team morale.”*1
Reduced competitive agility: “Technical debt can make it harder to respond to competitor threats. Your technical debt limits your ability to adjust and shift quickly to compete.”*2
So back to the question, how much is tech debt costing us annually and financially in lost opportunities? How does tech debt hinder the speed of our delivery, the cost to morale, and on retention?
Follow-up Questions:
If we aren’t tracking this, why not?
How will we begin to track it?
*2 https://www.infoworld.com/article/3635708/technical-debt-will-sink-you.html
Interested in reading the full series?
7 Questions Board Members Should Be Asking start here: #1: What are the ages and annual costs for our most critical systems?
