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If you have tech debt in a project of your software company, then it can be useful and good for your company provided you keep it within manageable limits. Well, tech debt is a hack code of one-of software which disallows it to be used efficiently in the future. The primary reason for building tech debt is due the shortcuts availed in designing it quickly to keep up with the constant pressure of meeting the deadline. The outlook for tech debt may be different for different product owners, and many see it as an evil which kills a company silently while few others may differ.
It Could Be A Costly Loss
If you want to build a quality product, perfect for functionality and performance it would take a considerable amount of effort and time as well. The product you build has to be proven after carrying specific automated tests and then release it in the market. It is also required to take the market feedback on the product and iterate from time to time. This would make the product fit for the market and perfectly usable. Otherwise, it could be a costly loss for your company. When you add a simple ‘If’ statement in the primary controller, you can run a quick but useful product test to see whether or not you can add a new feature to it and whether or not your users would like it.
Make Expandable Configuration
Such complexities may give rise to tech debt, and the best solution, in this case, is to add a helper or class in it so that it would enable any further configuration and make the project expandable for other tests. Such process can also be implemented when you want and existing logic to be cleaned. When you add complexities like an ‘If’ statement, it could be done within five minutes whereas a proper fixing through refactoring may take hours and such significant difference in the usage of time results in further tech debt.
Repair And Rebuilt
Since you have to repair the defective codes and sometimes even rebuilt it altogether which takes a lot of time, effort and money, resulting in a loss, such debts should be kept under manageable limits. This extra time and effort that you have to pay unnecessarily are the interest of the debt. This is where it is compared with financial debt where you have to pay it back on time with interest to prevent any further accumulation. To gain immediate access to something you can take debt but pay it on time even with credit card consolidation loan to keep it within manageable limits.
Knowledge Of It
When you want to add tech debt, it should be done with the full knowledge of the business counterparts. All should know that such acceptance of a new feature may even take hours of coding down the road for refactoring to pay off the debt in the future. This is necessary so that everyone would agree to clean it up if the experiment fails at any time. Tech debt is, therefore, the cost of doing business, and just like any cost, it should be properly managed.
