As every business strives to stay competitive in the global market, automation becomes increasingly crucial. It is no secret that customers expect the best.
There is no stopping them. Businesses can simply go somewhere else if they fail to meet their demands. It is crucial that organizations adapt the relevant application stacks to stay competitive. However, that comes at a price. In a time of tight deadlines and limited resources, pushing to exceed expectations constantly leads to accumulating technical debt for applications.
What Is Technical Debt?
A technical debt is the result of bad code, bad design, rushed development, and sometimes overly complex code. The problem isn’t caused by bad developers. In fact, it’s not always the case. Code is thrown together in a hurry to create a task. Later, if the task needs to be corrected, it can be revisited. This rarely happens, though.
Types of Technical Debt
- The business knows that a planned project will result in technical debt, and is willing to take on the debt as part of its overall mission. The downside is that technical debt can pile up quickly. This can quickly negate any potential benefits.
- New requests that lead to outdated code for an existing project (commonly caused by scope creep, technological advances, and other corporate-level changes).
- Development mistakes caused by poor abilities, lack of communication, unreasonable demands, etc.
A credit card analogy for technical debt
It helps to think about credit cards in order to better understand technical debt. You don’t pay interest on your credit card balance for a grace period after you use the card. In these cases, you won’t have to worry about additional charges if you pay off your credit card.
A credit card debt that is not fully paid off follows you around, slowly increasing. Your payments are suddenly going to interest instead of principle. You can only get rid of it if you work harder and dedicate more resources to the effort. Credit card debt is different because it is quantified. There is a certain number you need to reach to get out of this. There’s no such thing as technical debt.
You can’t measure it. There are quick fixes or resource-intensive nightmares. Fixing it is the only sure way to find out. When you ignore it, you only make matters worse as you increase your technical debt with every minute that you are working on crufty code
Specific Sources of Technical Debt
The problem of technical debt is often caused by cruft later on in the development of a project. The reason is that you can only fix technical debt if you have to go back and fix it. When it stays as is, there is no problem. Unit seems sensible to avoid it, but that’s only true if you’re only considering your business from a detached point of view.
It doesn’t happen very often. Technical debt is rarely the goal of developers. There are a variety of reasons for their existence, and not all of them are preventable.
Sources of Technical Debt:
- Time-saving measures taken to meet the deadline.
- resulting in poor specification of the application.
- No experienced coders available to do the coding.
- Tools needed to properly prepare and assemble the product.
- product product’s insufficient testing
The problem of technical debt is not always due to ineptitude or a lack of foresight. There are some projects that don’t require trimming. There are some solutions that are only temporary and the payoff isn’t enough to eliminate the cruft. Some projects that were intended to remain temporary become permanent, resulting in technical debt that must be paid off before moving forward.
Technical Debt Solutions
Disconnects between IT departments, project developers, and the C-Suite also contribute to technical debt. It is important to remember that not all technical debt is bad. It’s okay to leave the code alone. When you clean it up, you cause problems. To avoid a major problem in the future, you need a plan for tackling your technical debt.
Low Code as a Solution to Technical Debt
A development team is not affordable for every business.You may already have heavy demands on your DevOps team, even if your company is a large company.
Development of new features. These take up a lot of time in the IT department. The management of technical debt can sometimes place programmers in a bind. Fortunately, low-code solutions contribute significantly to freeing up resources. Staying relevant is a constant struggle for businesses.
Their approach is often to add new features and expand offerings that meet or exceed customer expectations.They do so while balancing legacy system debt. Low code enables developers to implement lasting solutions quickly and with minimum technical debt. It is also possible for non-developers to step in and relieve the burdens of IT departments by building applications themselves.
It should come as no surprise that low code applications cater to the needs of the “citizen developer”. They are by definition minimally coded. The application of low code relies instead on easy-to-use visual interfaces. Aside from this, they’re easy to set up through APIs and quick to integrate. The results are developers have more time to focus on core aspects of the application.
