What Is Technology Debt? How to Lower It?

Technology debt, or tech debt, is one of the buzzwords repeated by businesses around the world. Although everybody talks about it, many organizations still struggle with it. Why?

Lowering tech debt isn’t a one-off activity; it’s an ongoing process. What is more, it is a process that takes time and expertise, both of which can be difficult to get in sufficient amounts if other IT projects are carried out in your company. How to tackle this challenge, then? Here’s an article on how we approach it at j‑labs!

What Is Technology Debt?

In essence, technology debt is money – the theoretical amount of investments you would need to make in order to remove and replace sub-optimal IT solutions. However, it can also be observed in more practical ways, as it takes the form of:

• lower system performance due to sub-optimal code,
• longer app/system update times due to messy, complicated code,
• the number of errors occurring in a software solution due to previously used code,
• decreased developer productivity,
• reduced system flexibility,
• security vulnerabilities,
• poor user experience,
• and so on.

What’s important is that every business generates tech debt sooner or later. This is why we mentioned in the introduction that lowering it is an ongoing cycle. So, the fact that you have tech debt doesn’t necessarily show that there is a problem – the issues start if it gets too high.

Why Do Businesses Generate Tech Debt?

There are two main reasons why businesses struggle with tech debt in the first place:

• Unconsciously – They are unaware of the problem, so they don’t implement active measures to prevent tech debt from growing.
• Consciously – They sacrifice some technological aspects for larger profits, for instance, to put a digital product on the market faster and outpace their main competitor.

How to Handle Tech Debt? J-labs Perspective

Every business is in a different situation. Thus, the basis is to understand the causes of your tech debt and define the priorities — elements that will be the most cost-effective to change. This is why our IT project outsourcing services always begin with a tech audit, during which we can define the issues and come up with an action plan.

Once this is done, it is time to proceed with finding practical solutions. How can we help you with that at j‑labs?

• A team tailored to your needs – We will build a team specifically with your technical needs in mind to ensure you have the best experts in the areas we’ll be working with.
• Taking experience into account – During IT team augmentation, we don’t focus purely on technical skills but also on the experience of our specialists in handling difficult projects and reducing technical debt in situations like yours.
• Clean code & best practices – Whether you need help lowering your technical debt or you simply need a new IT solution, we adopt the clean code approach and best industry practices to ensure that our code won’t be the reason for your future tech debt.
• We promote high quality – Starting with project templates, through code reviews, and automated testing to CI/CD.
• Communication and advice – We communicate with you throughout the whole process and advise you on the key areas, modules, and code parts to determine where it is best to invest your time and resources for maximum profits.

Through all of this, we can deliver new solutions and refine old ones to limit the technical debt. At the same time, we want to underline that technical debt isn’t always caused by mistakes or bad programming – it’s a natural element that will occur over time, hence the need to continuously reduce it as it stacks up.

Lower Your Tech Debt by Good Planning

Tech debt is inevitable. What you can do is actively try to lower it and design products that will generate it more slowly. The key takeaways from our experience are that you cannot let it escalate and have to work on it continuously. Need help with that? Contact us at j‑labs!

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