Managing Technical Debt While Balancing Business Requirements

I've been through this a lot. As software engineer we want to keep improving on systems, but endless business requirements priorities keep these tasks pushed to background.

What is technical debt?

when preference is given to deliver a feature early rather to make it efficient and foolproof. This, at first, saves some time in terms of cost optimization, but later starts making system/development process slow or increased bugs over the time.

Technical debt is like additional work or cost incurred when a short-term, suboptimal technical solutions is chosen instead of more effective, longer-term solutions. and it repeats over time.

It's is not always bad. At times it's justifiable to give preference to deliver business requirements at beginning because we want to go lean to run experiments quickly and take business alignment for product.

But huge technical debt leads to have reduced efficiency, might increase costs in terms of performance/coding/testing, more bugs, messy code or system design leads lesser interest to make changes in it (specially by new developers)

Fact that technical debt is every company. in older company it comes with legacy code/systems, newer company it's prioritized business roadmap.

So technical debt happens when:

• We prioritize to meet business deadlines.
• Lack of efficient system design or architectural decisions.
• Not upgrading to technologies frequently. makes code outdated.
• Making bugs as features (developers love it ;-))
• Less motivation or lack of expertise to make changes/improvements in code or system design as it might lead to other bugs.

So How to deal with Technical debt along with business requirements?

Think before you build:

Apply best practices - follow clean coding principles. regular code refactor.

Balance speed and quality: try negotiating on speed with quality. indicate future upcoming risks.

Normalize experiments properly: if running experiments, calculate normalization cost correctly and propose additional time.

Track - always create tasks or documentation to track tech debts and follow up on them. evaluate it's impact.

Try to make decoupled code: if system is complicated, pick small chunk of it and decouple it, remove dependency and keep iterating it.

Brainstorm on tech debt tasks with team - this will give you some idea on what can be done to fix them, team members might pick them based on interest. motivate your team members to participate on these tasks as challenge, and provide recognition for it's completion.

Balanced approach that aligns technical priorities with business goals:

Include technical tasks in roadmap - as lead, you must explain your tech debt list with stakeholders to understand it's impact and then add it to quarterly or monthly business planning, include risks and costs. keep ratio about 20% - 35% depending on business point of view.

Adopt incremental fixes - do not do everything at once. make smaller tasks and include to planning.

Encourage ownership - empower your team to own best practices and keep looking into tech debts. some might go with enhancements or feature upgrade.

Use latest technologies - these days you can use AI to figure out optimized approach to tackle this situation. effort will be less and impact can be huge.

PS: This is endless. So be mindful what should be done and what is not required. Over-engineering isn't always beneficial.