Technical Debt is a concept that was introduced in Agile project delivery as a way to understand how to make better software development decisions. I think it’s just as relevant in any technology based decisions.
So much so that I propose that there is a mathematical formula to explain it.
The first part of the equation describes that the more strategic decisions you make and less tactical, the less it will influence the end result (smaller number). But you need to understand that time makes technical debt worse, so that needs to be added as a multipler.
But what is technical debt?
We are very familiar with the concept of borrowing money to buy a car or a house. In a perfect world, we would all have enough money to buy that house or car outright. To do that, we need to save up the money. To shortcut the saving aspect, we go to the bank and borrow money to buy things now. But there is a cost; it’s called interest. You pay the bank back, and when you do, you need to pay interest, the longer you take to pay, the more interest you will pay.
It’s no different with technical debt.
Your options are to take your time and do it right (strategic decisions) or if there is urgency and you want to shortcut the end-state, you do what you need to do, making compromises for the long term vision (tactical) decisions.
You also need to add the complexity of time (interest) to this, because the longer you live with a tactical decision, the harder it is to leave it. This is because over time you will get more users dependent on the system, more data in the database to migrate, or more of other systems and processes dependent on it.
Is there anything wrong with making tactical decisions and inheriting technical debt? Absolutely not! Just as borrowing money for a car or a home you must pay it back, same applies to your technical debt. At some stage you need to pay that debt back. It will cost more to decommission it, to replace with a strategic system or migrate to where you want to be.
The issue we have is that many times tactical decisions are made not realizing that there is a debt to pay off. That is what needs to be highlighted. Use the formula above to communicate it to your business stakeholders.