Technical debt is a debt that you incur every time you avoid doing the right thing (like refactoring, removing duplication/redundancy), thereby letting the code quality deteriorate over time. As with financial debt, it is the easy thing to do in the short term; however, over time, you pay interest on this debt - the code quality deteriorates over time. And as with real debt, it can be used beneficially if managed well.
1. Refactor technical debt away. Apply several forms of refactoring, including code refactoring, data model refactoring, and report interface refactoring. Refactorings are typically very small, such as renaming an operation or splitting a data mart column, so should just be part of everyday development. Rework, on the other hand, is more substantive and should be explicitly planned. The Architecture owner (see below) will often negotiate rework-oriented work items with the Product Owner (the person on the team who is responsible for prioritising the work).
2. Regression test continuously. One of the easiest ways to find problems in your work is to have a comprehensive regression test suite that is run regularly. This test suite will help you detect when defects are injected into your code, enabling you to fix them, or back out the changes, right away.
3. Have an explicit architecture owner. The Architecture Owner (AO) should be responsible for guiding the team through technical decisions, particularly those at the architecture level. AOs often mentor other team members in design skills, skills that should help them to avoid injecting new technical debt into the environment. They should also be on the lookout for existing technical debt and where appropriate motivate the team to address that technical debt when appropriate.
4. Do a bit of up front thinking. Develop a technical strategy early-on in your project. By thinking through critical technical issues before you implement your solution, you have the opportunity to avoid a technical strategy which needs to be reworked at a future date. The most effective way to deal with technical debt is to avoid it in the first place.
5. Be enterprise aware. Good development teams are enterprise aware, realising that what they do should leverage and enhance the overall organisational ecosystem. They will work close with your enterprise architects, so that they can take advantage of existing IT assets. An important strategy for avoiding technical debt is to reuse existing assets and not rebuild or rebuy something that you already have.
Manage your debt and it will pay you back; pay no attention to it and you may end-up with a credit bubble!
