Ways In Which Technical Debt Affects Costs

Every software engineering and development company is bound to have technical debt, and it is necessary to address them and repay at the earliest to survive in the long run. Otherwise, tech debt affects cost in ways more than one. Therefore, the primary objective of a software company is to produce clean codes designed and developed by someone who cares about the company. When you cut corners and produce codes in haste to meet the pressure of early release tech debt occurs and starts to strangulate your company. It is also a result of poor software designing, development, and architecture as well.

Impacts Of Tech Debt

With the increase in the pace of the IT industry in the past decade people have been incurring tech debt worth millions of dollars due to lack of standard practices, faulty designs, immature processes followed. When you do not care for the reusability of code, its scalability as well as maintainability, it contributes to the accumulation of tech debt resulting in extra expense due to the extra effort required for its refactoring and maintenance. Just like any financial debt tech debt also has its effect on cost on maintenance as well as cost your business loss due to a bad reputation. More and more users start leaving you resulting in lower revenue along with the extra expense of maintenance.

Increase In Project Cost

There are different categories of tech debt like design debt, code debt, It infrastructure debt and much more. You can click here to know more about such debts in detail and how it all affects the cost of business. It increases the project cost by decreasing the readability of the code. When your code has an anemic domain model, it becomes very difficult to read the code. It also lacks meaningful naming of classes, code modularization and much more. It affects the functionality of the code when implemented in Object Oriented programming technology or OOP due to its procedural style of writing.

Maintenance Schedule And Time

When your code is not readable, it affects the maintenance directly as it takes a long time to modify the code due to its difficulty in readability. This increase in the maintenance effort results in an increase in project cost as well. It might also call for additional developers and once again increase the cost of production and lengthen the project schedule. All these extra efforts result in an increase in time to market the product. This delay thereby results in decreased productivity which further results in loss of customers, loss of competitive advantage and much more.

Some Psychological Costs

Tech debt also has some psychological effects to your business as well. It increases employee attrition, frustration, and helplessness. No developer would enjoy sitting in front of the computer knowing that the code is impossibly brittle and complicated to rework on. Such codes are more prone to errors and increase the chances of defect induction, the risk of legacy application and finally very low return on your investment. All these attributes of tech debt can kill your company if you ignore tech debt.