Tackle Your Technical Debt

Technical debt accumulates in software development organizations, threatening efficiency and productivity.

Software has become one of the core differentiating factors and profit engines for companies. As such, it is imperative to the long-term sustainability of corporate software development that companies have a strategy for dealing with and proactively managing their technical debt.

In this guide, you'll find:

What Is Technical Debt?

How Can Tech Debt Be Managed?

The Next Steps

Technical Debt – The Tumor within Software Development

Technical debt is a complex concept; however, in simplified terms, it's the accumulation of complex code within software. This complexity impairs efficiency and makes developers more prone to mistake. Just as almost every company has some form of financial debt, technical debt is unavoidable in the large software organizations present in modern corporations. In fact, according to a survey by McKinsey, CIOs estimate that 20-40% of their technical estate is technical debt.

Technical debt can in some ways be compared to a tumor. If it becomes large enough, it may effectively kill the codebase by forcing the company to start the code from scratch in what's called a Greenfield approach. Similar to surgeons dealing with a painful tumor, companies need an X-ray view of their software production before they're able to develop a proper strategy for excising it and managing it.

Actively Managing Technical Debt

 

How to Create Sustainable Software Development

As briefly mentioned before, software development is critical for the success and survival of companies in the digital age. No longer can executives afford to relegate software to the sole domain of the IT department. Despite being one of the system-critical issues facing software, technical debt has too often been allowed to grow unrestrained, in part because software development lacked the transparency necessary for tracking and managing tech debt.

Software analytics can provide this much-needed transparency. The Digital Boardroom from Seerene supplies executives and managers with KPIs to quantify technical debt and track the success of efforts to reduce or manage it.  Furthermore, software analytics assist developers in rectifying the problem. With Seerene, developers are able to easily identify problematic areas of code and dive deep to find and fix the root cause. 

Software visualizations, in the form of Software Maps, provide an additional level of transparency into your software's code. These visualizations make the health of your code obvious and intuitive for everyone from the C-suite to the developers. The ability to drilldown makes it easy to identify technical debt and track progress. 

Software Map

 

The Next Steps

The software analytics from Seerene has many other powerful applications for your software development organization, from simplifying the technical debt reduction process to migrating to the cloud. While this article provided a general overview of how Seerene can be applied to technical debt reduction, we would be happy to discuss with you in detail how our platform can help you in a multitude of ways.

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You can also read more about technical debt strategies and software analytics:

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