Technical debt, what is it? It is a term used to describe the consequences of making suboptimal decisions during the software development process. Just as financial debt can accumulate and hinder a company’s growth, technical debt can slow down productivity, increase maintenance costs, and impede innovation. In this blog, I’ll explore why companies be concerned about technical debt and discuss different strategies to prevent the creation of technical debt.

The hidden costs of technical debt

At first glance, cutting corners and taking shortcuts may seem like a time-saving practice, especially when companies are pushing for more throughput and ever-increased developer productivity. However, technical debt accrues interest over time and can result in increased development and maintenance costs. The average developer spends more than 17 hours a week dealing with maintenance issues such as refactoring and debugging code. So, why not ignore it? The answer is simple; unresolved technical debt can lead to inefficiencies, delayed projects, and system failures. Therefore, it is crucial for companies to acknowledge that addressing technical debt upfront is more cost-effective than dealing with its consequences later on.

Technical debt’s impact on productivity and innovation

Technical debt may hinder a company’s capability to deliver new features and foster innovation. As technical debt accumulates, developers spend more and more time debugging and maintaining a messy legacy code, leaving less time for the development of new features and innovation. A system or even a codebase burdened with technical debt becomes harder to maintain, slowing down the development process and hampering agility. By proactively managing technical, companies can maintain an innovative and productive environment for their developers.

Maintaining software quality and preventing technical debt

High-quality software is vital for businesses to provide a seamless user experience, gain a competitive edge, and build customer trust. However, maintaining high-quality software can be easier said than done. Technical debt compromises the quality of software by introducing issues such as unoptimized code, architectural laws, and inadequate test coverage. To help in code maintenance, organizations often look to integrate tools in their development pipelines to meet quality standards and ensure test coverage, as well as software reliability and security.

First and foremost, fostering a culture of code reviews and automated testing promotes better code quality and reduces the likelihood of introducing debt. Secondly, incorporating regular refactoring into the development process allows developers to address potential debt early on, enhancing code maintainability and scalability.

At Metabob, our goal is to provide an AI-based code review tool (static code analysis), that helps developers prevent pushing bad code by detecting errors that would cause issues in later stages of the development pipeline. Metabob can detect problems rising from hundreds of categories, including, for example, unhandled edge cases, internal API mismatches, and race conditions. Our detections are made with a proprietary graph-attention-based neural network. The tool then explains the detected problems in plain English, using an integrated LLM to generate the explanation. Lastly, developers can ask the tool to provide a code recommendation to instantly fix the detected problem or ask questions about the detected problems.

Conclusion

Technical debt is a challenge that every software development team faces, but its impact can be mitigated through proactive measures, such as having the right processes in place as well as the right tooling. By understanding the hidden costs of technical debt and implementing strategies to prevent its creation, companies can ensure long-term software quality, maintain productivity and innovation, and foster a culture of continuous improvement. By prioritizing the maintenance of high code quality, companies can tackle technical debt head-on and build robust, scalable, reliable, and secure software.