10 Signs that Technical Debt is Damaging Your Business

Technical debt is impacting companies in various ways, and it is important to recognise the warning signs that could indicate it is reaching dangerous levels in your business.

“I’ve witnessed personally people jumping on parts of the plane to align them… that’s not how you build a plane,” stated Sam Salehpour. As a Boeing engineer, he highlighted serious concerns regarding the production of the 777 and 787 Dreamliner. Despite raising alarms about risky shortcuts taken in production, management ignored his warnings and reassigned him. In his new project, he observed poor quality alignment of body parts and noticed engineers feeling pressured to approve work without adequate inspection.

When a company prioritises quick IT solutions over a long-term, effective, and secure strategy, it creates technical debt. Sam Salehpour cautioned that such practices could lead to catastrophic outcomes, which was tragically validated by a recent crash of one of these aircraft that resulted in more than 240 fatalities.

Growing Technical Debt

In a competitive landscape, companies must continually undergo modernisation. A staggering 71% of its overall impact relies on technology. However, when the IT team resorts to suboptimal, one-size-fits-all, and rushed solutions, the result is often complex integrations, spaghetti code, and, critically, unsustainable technical debt. This can consume 10 to 20% of a brand’s IT budget intended for new products. Technical debt can also accumulate through temporary fixes that become permanent or by neglecting to update outdated solutions, many of which may have seemed sensible at the time.

This vicious cycle complicates future projects and multiplies hidden costs in the form of lost opportunities or wasted resources. An excess of technical debt means the IT team spends significant time managing outdated systems, making it increasingly difficult to integrate new products. Additionally, hidden architectural problems can lead to budget overruns and missed deadlines. Companies may also struggle to fully utilise advanced analytics for improved decision-making due to inconsistencies in their data architectures.

Alarmingly, around 60% of CIOs surveyed believe that technical debt in their organisations has significantly increased over the past three years. While some level of technical debt is an unavoidable cost of doing business, it can often be exacerbated by avoidable mistakes. At TITANS, we’ve compiled a list of warning signs that indicate technical debt is accumulating within a company:

1. Lack of Architecture

A well-designed technology architecture impacts not only system interfaces (i.e., what technology components need to connect) but also the security, extensibility, and maintainability of software. The absence of standardised approaches to systems integration often leads to numerous point-to-point integrations between applications. If a company cannot agree on a consistent data model, data quality diminishes, and costs rise.

Inflexible software with custom-developed packages or monolithic blocks of code with poor interfaces that limit reusability also tend to be a problem. If a company does not maintain or upgrade the infrastructure required to run systems, it risks experiencing service slowdowns during peak usage times or even hardware or software failures that can potentially affect both employees and customers.

2. Poor Alignment Between IT and Strategy

Companies should be cautious if they struggle to clarify their overall business strategy or measure the impact of IT initiatives on strategic goals. Additionally, the misalignment between funding and strategy, where resource allocation is disconnected from portfolio management and there is no consensus on estimating the total cost of ownership, serves as another warning sign. Inadequate technology integration during mergers and acquisitions can lead to excessive complexity, orphaned systems, fragmented data sets and increased risk.

3. Lack of a Full Lifecycle Vision

Technology that is outdated but not yet retired requires constant maintenance and repair to prevent it from becoming a security risk. Additionally, if data is stored on such technology, extracting and using it may become increasingly difficult over time. Without an end-of-life strategy, your organisation may struggle to comply with increasingly stringent data protection regulations. For example, plaintext information stored on outdated technology may need to be encrypted.

4. Ineffective Leadership

As trends evolve rapidly, organisations often make decisions that they do not fully understand or implement unnecessary tools. Another bad scenario that CIOs with software backgrounds are particularly prone to is prioritising short-term project goals. Consequently, many applications are developed to address specific business problems without considering their future evolution or other relevant contexts. Furthermore, if a company lacks essential skills or has limited organisational capacity, it risks delivering products late to users.

5. Poor Management of Development and Maintenance Processes

Many firms may skip critical process steps, such as refining application requirements, reviewing code, or conducting final testing. Issues like poor backlog prioritisation, inadequate use of task planning tools, and weak connections to business value significantly contribute to the escalation of technical debt. Furthermore, brands that fail to measure code quality irregularly, spend a lot of time on difficult manual testing, and have poor failure recovery, may encounter further risks. Several add-ons that deviate from the original system intent, lack proper documentation or contradict each other can also exacerbate these issues.

6. Low-Quality Software Code

This issue arises when developers opt for the latest tools without a clear business justification for the project. Additionally, they may take risky shortcuts or adhere to poor coding practices. A lack of onboarding and training in coding can also lead to faulty code. Conditions worsen when the team is under time constraints due to poor planning or the need to rewrite outsourced code. 

7. Disconnect Between Development and Operations

A common problem in large organisations is when engineers design a product without considering how the operations team will support it. This disconnect can result in cumbersome, inefficient, and error-prone solutions. The programming discipline of DevOps was created largely to address this issue by integrating representatives from the operations team into the development process.

However, a similar lack of collaboration can occur in other areas. For example, infrastructure engineers might deploy routers or SD-WAN devices without understanding how these devices will be maintained or updated. Cybersecurity teams may introduce endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems without knowing how they integrate with desktop support services.

8. Sensitive Data Embedded in Code

Sometimes programmers inadvertently grant excessive permissions during development or include access credentials directly in the code, failing to rectify these issues before the release. This oversight enables attackers to uncover sensitive data, such as passwords or certificates, significantly increasing security risks for organisations.

9. Lack of Documentation

Comprehensive and up-to-date technical documentation is essential for recording the entire software development process, especially project code and infrastructure. Without proper documentation, a company can waste valuable time and money. For instance, current programmers may struggle to understand why previous developers made certain coding choices. Often, teams might not even realise that critical knowledge has been lost over time. This can occur due to individual preferences or the specific nature of the job.

10. Inadequate Software Testing

Neglecting software testing in application development can lead to serious consequences. This issue usually arises in organisations that lack sufficient quality assurance support or have not implemented DevOps with automated testing capabilities.

The surge of technical debt related to security, infrastructure, and processes has also been exacerbated by the rapid shift to remote work due to COVID-19. Many of the challenges faced were unavoidable, as organisations had to adapt quickly. For example, cloud migrations were accelerated, IT ops teams became leaner, and corporate processes were shortened.

For companies burdened by technical debt, saving part of their budget can be invaluable. They often achieve this by hiring experienced IT specialists who can provide missing knowledge, a fresh perspective, and additional skilled support. Instead, this approach allows them to avoid the time-consuming process of recruiting new employees and mitigate some of the consequences of technical debt upfront.

Are you interested in the outsourcing strategies employed by brands like WhatsApp, Google, Slack, and Skype? If you’re looking to reduce costs associated with inefficient solutions, you can find valuable information about hiring IT experts here.