Digital Transformation has revolutionized how businesses operate, redefined the business systems and their mode of information exchange. Technology enthusiasts take advantage of the growing gap in the digital transformation market space. However, focusing on key considerations for managing workspace resources eliminates Tech Debt.
What is Tech Debt?
Tech Debt is a situation where there is a huge demand for tech talent with the right set of skills to work on a specific IT solution. Although the problem exists at all times, the lead time taken to hire best talent in-place of existing or new positions is a challenge. Particularly, when the gap narrows to acute shortage for resources while there is huge demand for the position to keep the balls rolling in the application development space.
Causes of Tech Debt
Tech Debt is an integral part of the software development cycle and gets harder while working with more challenging solutions to real world problems. The factors that make Tech Debt possible in a development setup can be a direct or in-direct contributor. Let’s look into some of the possibilities of Tech Debt.
Short term solutions
The solutions built for problems must consider the relevance of it in the future, and anything that is less adaptable or short term fixes will always lead to a Tech Debt scenario. Though solutions are bound to solving problems arising in the present context, an innovative or short term solution is not always the right approach towards solving any Digital Transformation problem.
Frequent version Rollbacks
Switching back and forth on proposed technology solutions, often outside the absorption window, also creates a Tech Debt situation. The productivity is affected harder if it happens in a manufacturing or production environment.
More than time and investment, the skilled and learned human resource is the most needed at the right time and with the required set of knowledge.
Inefficient business processes
The current trend in cloud based development is the asynchronous development practices backed by the Agile methodology. Though it has an upside in developing applications in a lean principle, it also impacts the current product life cycle in the production environment.
Accumulated Tech Debt happens due to a less efficient business process that fails to synchronize the development demands against the customer requirements. It makes application development practice questionable and unreliable in the long run.
Create a Zero Tech Debt
The ultimate goal of any Digital Transformation product or service is to create a zero tech debt solution that stays relevant irrespective of time and complexity of the problem space. Here are a few pointers to look at or practice upon to build a viable zero tech debt product solution.
Incremental changes
Doing small increments at a steady pace can help identify an effective solution and avoid frequent version rollbacks. A time bound, responsive solution development improves the effectiveness of the solution in the long run.
Creating small and manageable code improvements on a regular short release cycle improves the stability of application bug fixes and eliminates setbacks of the application.
Manage talent
Skill-up resources and keep them competent with the demands of the current software development trend. On the other hand, reduce the time spent on re-organizing the workforce to address or build any new developments in the application.
Custom Agile
Agile Methodology can be tweaked to cater the needs of evolving business operations. Develop a custom Agile method that works best for the business function solving anticipated setbacks. So, it is better to maintain a track record of past performance of applications and its incremental development updates. It helps to refine and adopt the best fit Agile practice for any business operation.