🛑The bad choices of developers' code or design will incur technical debt. But not all debts are good debts!

Technical debts are exactly like financial💵 debts. You need to pay them back. In software development practice, this means fixing the shortcuts the team made, redesigning the quick-and-dirty codes they wrote, and so on.

💢Some technical debts have less interest than others. The ones with high interest rates are scary. They generally become show-stoppers when facing new changing requirements, especially when these requirements relate to some aspect of the business operation, such as business rules, business processes, business decisions, etc.

Why?

✨Because their frequency of change is high, also their overall clarity on what exactly is needed is often lacking. These introduce significant complexity in implementation as they require flexibility in change, and the technical debts incurred do not allow changes easily with minimum side effects and quickly.

So what happens?

💣The business is always under tremendous pressure; therefore, the operation and SME teams require new changes due to compliance, market shifts, new products or strategies, and so on. On the other hand, the software development and IT teams cannot deliver as quickly for good reasons, such as a big backlog caused by technical debts, in-house building of various engines, and so on. As a result, the business, operation, and SME teams will choose to take care of what they need themselves—they welcome Shadow IT.

Sound familiar?

🎇I'd suggest that next time the software development team is trying to solve anything that has the word “business” in it, e.g., business rules, business processes, and business decisions, they should not look over it as just a typical software component, even if they are asked to do so. These require integration with business solutions such as “rules management”, “process management”, and “decision management”.

🤝The partnership between IT and Business is way more important than what may appear on the surface to be a simple trade-off for how to write code. It has deep implications, and at the end of the day, wrong designs or even a single wrong line of code can hurt the business, with significant consequences.

#TechnicalDebt #SoftwareDevelopment #Code #SoftwareDesign #agile #ShadowIT

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Published June 6th, 2024 at 07:30 am