Technical debt

There were times in college when I would not do laundry for weeks (gross, I know). Then finally I would have no choice but to spend an entire Sunday in the laundry room. I could not do any of the fun things I would normally associate with a Sunday, and I would kick myself for not doing it more regularly to make it less of a hassle.

That is exactly what it is like when software, systems, and tools are not upgraded, patched, or replaced on a regular basis. The time and money associated with these legacy systems piles up and contributes to your company's "technical debt." The longer it lingers, the harder technical debt is to clean up.

The perils of too much technical debt...

Preventing and eliminating technical debt

The best way to avoid technical debt is to have a continuous pulse on your systems and their health. This is everyone's job. Everyone must be aware of the risks and understand the impact of their technology's lifecycle. This requires the people most familiar (usually the most technical) to be able to articulate the need and value of an upgrade, for example, in ways senior management or product owners can understand. That is not always easy to do, so I recommend ways in which addressing technical debt becomes part of the process:

1. Continuous improvement culture - A culture in which people are rewarded for making things better and always striving to improve is the single best way to minimize technical debt. When team members inherently feel motivated and empowered, technical debt goes down exponentially.
2. Mandate open standards - Utilizing proprietary technologies can lock companies into vendors or tools for many years. This can be quite costly. Mandating the use of technologies which are built upon or use open standards is required to be nimble and relevant long term. Open standards prevent team members from re-inventing the wheel, help avoid vendor lock-in, improve agility and choice, and dramatically increase application portability and integration. These all in turn help minimize technical debt.
3. Add a hardening sprint - If you are following Agile practices (and even if you are not), you can consider adding a hardening sprint to your schedule every quarter. So if you do 2-week sprints, the last 2 weeks of each quarter can be dedicated to working on stories related to reducing technical debt (or "hardening" the system). The beauty of this is it becomes part of the whole team's routine, and increases visibility to the importance and benefits of eliminating technical debt. It does still require those closest to the technologies to be proactive in identifying improvements and articulating the value to the product owner.
4. Semi-dedicated Systems Team - Having a separate team of people dedicated to "owning" the architecture and maintaining system health sounds good on paper, but actually it leads to accountability problems. Instead, having everyone support what they build makes people think twice about cutting corners and throwing things "over the fence." As a result, I suggest having a group of senior technical folks dedicate 20-30% (not 100%) of their time to continuously improve and monitor system health. This does not mean that they do 100% of the work, but rather set the standards, goals, and requirements for the them and the rest of the team to do and follow. Some (or all) of the work done in a hardening sprint, for example, likely will be suggested by the Systems Team.
5. Call for back-up - In many cases, legacy systems come with significant risks to the business, usually security-related. Leverage your friends in the security department to help you build a business case for making the necessary changes to your systems (or what might happen if the changes are not made). Be sure to also paint a positive picture of the business benefits to come in the future as a result.
6. Governance - While my least favorite on the list, sometimes it does take some hard and fast governance rules to help prevent technical debt. Projects should not be approved which build upon legacy systems or have no clear plan for future upgrades.