What Is Technical Debt: A QA Tester’s Perspective

Strategic decisions we make, whether in everyday life or a technology realm, always have their consequences. So, imagine when you need to buy a car to get to work but don’t have the required sum. You borrow money and get the vehicle immediately. You win in a short-term perspective as you can get to work without delays. But the other side of the coin is paying interest. This saves extra costs, works harder, and invests more in car maintenance. So, you become in debt, whether it is financially or just energetically, as you have to push harder. This occurrence is also relevant for software development. Let’s discuss the phenomenon of technical debt and ways to avoid it.

What Is Technical Debt?

A technical debt, also called design debt or code debt, is a definition coined by Ward Cunningham, the software developer, that refers to the decision to choose a quick development sacrificing the quality. The term creator explained it to non-tech stakeholders in the way that debt is future costs for code refactoring.

Companies that choose a speedy time to market over a high-quality development process win from a short-range perspective. However, as with financial debt, overlooking issues results in debt accumulation. So, later on, they will need to invest more resources to fix the bug and improve software performance.

Types of Technical Debt

Digital products have different technology layers, so that tech debt can occur for any of them. Based on this classification, there exist such types of technical debt:

• Design debt. It appears in the system architecture and design. Working with tight deadlines as a priority and taking shortcuts results in receiving challenging software to extend, maintain, and scale. A design debt prevents developers from implementing new features efficiently, or the procedure becomes too risky.
• Code debt. When developers write code that is not clean, difficult to modify or understand, and not properly tested, it becomes a reason to gain code debt. Platforms with this issue are more prone to bugs and inconsistencies. In the future, software with a code debt can become too expensive to change and maintain.
• Documentation debt. When developers are in a hurry, they don’t document the code adequately and miss information or provide little information on how everything works. This poses a risk for future developers or new colleagues who won’t be able to cope with the code understanding easily without accurate documentation.
• Infrastructure debt. All software features heavily rely on the infrastructure. When communication software, servers, databases, and security applications are outdated, they can not ensure safe and quick request processing. Thus, infrastructure debt provokes slow response time, high downtime, and an inability to grow.

Factors Contributing to the Incidence of Tech Debt

Technology debt occurs because of many reasons. It might take intentional, unintentional, or environmental character. The following circumstances can lead to experiencing financial and resource losses in product creation and improvement:

• Tight deadlines. The software development process requires following strict guidelines and steps. When time is at stake, some stages might be skipped, and shortcuts might be used. Thus, it is unsurprising that the application code will lack clarity and reliability.

• Lack of knowledge. Mostly among startups, the talent pool is not extensive, and developers lack the expertise and experience. The mistakes and insufficiencies made at the early stages will not take long to show themselves after deployment.

• Changing requirements. Digital product development is rapidly changing, requiring businesses to tailor their application to new needs and challenges. This doesn’t set a clear line for development every time the demands are modified. As a result, engineers can apply quick fixes and changes without following a proper procedure.
• Technological progress. User needs change as fast as instruments and tools. Practices and frameworks become outdated, causing developers to struggle to maintain the existing system. Failing to implement updates quickly can lead to tech debt risk.

The Impact of Technical Debt on Software Quality

Measuring technical debt consequences is better spotted in terms of product quality. A lack of long-term vision can contribute to significant financial, reputational, and resource losses.

Testing Difficulties

Sacrifying product quality doesn’t only create a heavy burden for developing teams. It impacts every department but mostly quality assurance (QA) specialists. Testing procedures take longer when software acquires tech debt because of missing documentation, unclear code, and an unstable system. Thus, it becomes impossible to test places with shortcuts and other issues. The test coverage is reduced, and more bugs can slip through the testers’ hands. The time needed for testing is not enough to define and address all the weak points, so the testing process doesn’t go as intended.

Quality Risks

When companies seek only financial rewards and want to enter the market speedily, they overlook future product quality constraints. As software reaches its end users, demands for its performance become higher over time. However, a product with a tech deft can not meet new requirements and be easily optimized.

With quick and poorly tested feature implementation or testing, developers don’t address security issues. Platform vulnerabilities can lead to data leaks and overall poor experience, penalties, and legal responsibility.

Financial Losses

As with house renovation, if you finish demolition, construction, and cleanup, it will cost you dearly to return to the initial stage, namely the wiring. That is, you will have to demolish part of the work that you have already done. The same applies to technical debt as fixes in the further stages and after deployment will take a lot from the budget.

The side effect of sacrificing product quality is delays in development. So, pursuing the idea of rapid time to market can turn vice versa.

Managing Technical Debt: Role of QA Teams

QA specialists are, like no other team members, the ones who can avoid technical debt from occurring. They can spot code, design, and architecture inconsistencies as they test platforms by applying different methods and at the early development stages. So, this is how QA engineers reduce technical debt.

Identification

Testing teams are always the first to face system inaccuracies and bugs. They enter the development process early and thus can spot the issues before they grow into tech debt.

Prevention

QA testers can contribute a lot when collaborating with developers by participating in code reviews. These specialists can discover the issues from the testing perspective and set guidelines for preventing them in future development stages. Testing engineers also have deep expertise in design, so they can help build a user-friendly and reliable app design.

Mitigation

QA specialists can share this heavy task with developers and mitigate the risks if a technical debt has already occurred. Together, they can refactor the code and set automated testing for quick issue-catching.

Technical Debt Tools and Techniques

Modern development processes allow business owners to reduce technical debt and increase software reliability.

Static Code Analysis

This approach is a common technique that is frequently used by testers. Its value lies in the fact that the code can be examined without direct execution. It detects potential problems that can drastically complicate the development process, such as bugs or security vulnerabilities.

Code Coverage Analysis

Another essential stage that helps to evaluate the amount of code examined via automated testing routines is code coverage analysis. In case of high code coverage, we assume the product’s code has been mostly checked and passed the evaluations successfully. On the other hand, insufficient code coverage may indicate potential deployment and production maintenance issues.

Testing Automation

The testing automation routine involves specific scripts that automatically execute software checks. Thus, we receive a significant error reduction rate, increase the application’s general efficiency, and reduce the manual effort simultaneously. Incorporating automated tests is a perfect way to decrease technical debt, stop bugs from spreading, and facilitate deployment.

Tech Debt Examples

Managing technical debt and preventing it is crucial for staying a reliable company in a market. To better realize the importance of high-quality software development, let’s look at real examples of tech debts:

• Nokia. Have you noticed that Nokia produced the most demanded phones back in the day? And where is their popularity now? Technical debt is to blame. They used Symbian, an operating system that was outdated and difficult to maintain. Competitors preferred more flexible technologies, pushing Nokia out of the market.
• Knight Capital Group. This financial company has lost $440 million within 45 minutes. And all the losses happened because of the tech debt. Their software showed an unknown trading error, causing crashes to multiple financial operations.

Conclusion

Quality is a priority in software development. If put in second place after speed, it would lead to technical debt occurrence. This term characterizes all kinds of losses a company can face, overlooking the high-quality development process. So, if you don’t want to end up like Nokia or Knight Capital Group, we encourage you to prevent or mitigate technical debt in your project.