Tackling Technical Debt: strategies for agencies to mitigate the impact on their digital platforms

A few months ago, we delved into technical debt, exploring what it is and what it means for charities and how it can impact growth, audience engagement and innovation.

Similarly, technical debt can also cause disruptions for agencies if it accrues over time. If our systems aren’t working as they should and causing frustrations, it can affect the trust we build with our clients in our ability to deliver quality work. That’s why as an agency, managing technical debt is crucial for ensuring the long-term success of our clients’ digital platforms and maximising what we can achieve.

In this blog, we’ll look into the strategies agencies can use for tackling technical debt internally and the effective management practices we can put in place to mitigate impact on operations.

Identifying technical debt: a critical first step

To effectively tackle technical debt, we need to understand the root causes. This can be done through a thorough analysis of our digital platforms, including:

1. Regular code reviews: to identify areas requiring maintenance or where quick fixes were implemented. This helps catch potential future issues early.
2. Periodic technical audits: to identify potential security vulnerabilities and performance bottlenecks.
3. Stakeholder feedback: to actively gather feedback from stakeholders to understand their experiences with the digital platform and potential pain points related to technical debt.
4. Dedicated tagging in issue tracking: to clearly identify technical debt and link it to relevant tasks. This provides transparency for both internal teams and clients.

Prioritising code maintenance

Next, once we’ve identified the technical debt, we can then look at addressing this through code maintenance to improve overall code quality. This includes regular code refactoring to improve structure, readability, and maintainability and ensuring we adhere to coding standards.

Implementing effective management practices

Addressing technical debt isn’t a frictionless process. However, there are measures we can put in place to mitigate the impact agency operations. This can include:

1. Automated testing: integrating automated testing into the development process allows for early identification and resolution of issues, preventing them from escalating into significant technical debt.
2. Comprehensive documentation: investing time in maintaining comprehensive documentation for the codebase helps developers understand the system, making it easier to maintain, modify, and troubleshoot.
3. Employee training: providing ongoing training and development opportunities for the development team ensures that the team possesses the necessary skills to maintain and improve the codebase effectively.
4. Automated tools: using automated tools on repositories like dependabot allow for packages that need to be updated to be highlighted, creating safe and reliable pull requests to update those packages. This not only eases the burden on developers but also reduces the debt one pull request at a time!

How to address technical debt effectively

Addressing technical debt shouldn’t just be a reactive process. Taking a proactive approach will put your agency on the front foot for keeping technical debt at bay and ensure that it doesn’t become a neglected backlog item. This can be done by:

1. Prioritising technical debt into project roadmaps: integrating technical debt remediation into the project roadmap alongside new feature development will ensure it stays on the agenda.
2. Fostering a culture of accountability: to cultivate a sense of ownership and continuous improvement within the development team.
3. Implementing automation: use Github Actions to check your code for coding standards, coding structures, testing, and out of date packages to allow developers to focus on the items that matter!

What are the benefits of technical debt management?

So, now we’ve looked at how we can keep on top of our technical debt and how to address it, let’s look at the benefits.

1. Improved code quality: a cleaner, more well-structured codebase is easier to understand, modify, and extend.
2. Reduced costs: proactive management prevents the accumulation of costly and time-consuming technical debt.
3. Enhanced software performance: improving the stability, reliability and efficiency of the digital platform.
4. Increased productivity: a well-maintained codebase reduces the time spent on debugging and maintenance, freeing up a developer’s time to focus on more meaningful activities.
5. Enhance supporter engagement: a stable and high-performing platform leads to a better user experience and reduces support requests, improving engagement with your clients!

Conclusion

Technical debt is a significant challenge for agencies and their clients. However, by understanding its impact and implementing effective management practices, we can successfully mitigate its impacts.

By starting new projects on the right foot and implementing items such as coding standards, testing, accountability and code maintenance on new projects, we can prevent technical debt creeping into projects. This gives us the ability to create high-quality and sustainable digital platforms for clients, developers and project managers alike.

Want to learn more about technical debt? Read part one of our technical debt blog here.