Technical Debt At Frontend: How to Identify and Mitigate it
Technical debt slow development life cycles and even brings some of them to a screeching halt. And while CTOs and project managers devote enough attention to technical debt at the backend, nothing much has been done about the frontend. In this article, we'll understand all the nuances of technical debt at the frontend and learn ways to minimize it.
What is Technical Debt?
Technical debt is all the development work you need to do in the future that you skipped to maintain agility and profitability in the present.
Organizations, teams, and individuals don’t always stick to ideal development practices. Sometimes deadlines creep up, and developers decide to take a shortcut to expedite the product shipment. Other times, the team might not have the necessary resources to go the ideal route, so they implement a workaround to deliver the software.
Technical debt can be both deliberate as well as inadvertent and can stem from both reckless and prudent decisions. Technical debt quadrant, defined by Martin Fowler, is an apt representation of various situations under which companies draw technical debt.
However, unlike financial debt, technical debt is inevitable. Frameworks become obsolete, new testing methodologies show up, and you learn new design practices on the job. The cleanest of codebases accrue technical debt over time by virtue of technological advancements.
Why Shouldn’t You Overlook Technical Debt?
Technical debt is tricky to deal with and have no specific metrics attached to it. You can’t quantify the principal debt amount for when the shortcut was first taken and quantify the resources needed to pay off the interest and the principal. You also can’t accurately predict the expenditure of resources on technical debt with time.
All this fogginess around the quantification of technical debt gives birth to ignorance. Since you don’t see a tangible loss associated with it, you’ll ignore it for as long as possible. However, there’s only so long you can go before the debt becomes too much to handle. The repercussions of unattended technical debt can be observed at all levels within the company. Here’s how it affects the entire organization tree:
Technical debt and developers
Engineers are the first to feel the brunt of technical debt. It directly impacts their productivity as it adds a lot of resistance to the forward motion in the development lifecycle.
Fixing problems in the existing codebase is challenging. If a developer has to spend a larger chunk of time on paying off technical debt rather than adding value to the software, their morale will take a hit. It’s why developers want to join organizations with a cleaner codebase. So too much technical debt not only makes your organization less appealing for potential candidates but also gets the existing developers to start looking for other opportunities.
Technical debt and sales and marketing
Sales teams thrive on boasting about the advanced software features or the ability to pivot quickly based on customer’s needs. Technical debt leaves them with very few tricks up their sleeves to close the deal, affecting their commissions.
Marketing campaigns require a lot of upfront planning. It’s crucial for the team to know when a specific feature or even the product will be launched. But since you lose predictability with increasing technical debt, these folks find it challenging to run profitable campaigns.
Technical debt and engineering teams
The poor predictability affects velocity. The workflows don’t go as planned, and the overall rigidity also affects their relationships with other teams. And then getting back from the rut of technical debt becomes even more difficult as the entire team experiences the hit on morale.
Technical debt and the organization
It doesn’t take long for the technical debt to reflect on the entire company’s performance. Leaders find it difficult to add value to the software product and subsequently entice new and existing products. It chokes the revenue stream, which further makes it difficult to deal with the technical debt.
The internal friction between teams shows up in the form of bugs and errors on the final product, eventually shrinking the customer base. Frontend technical debt relays the anomalies fastest to the customer side. You must develop a sound understanding of how technical debt accumulates at the frontend and the steps you can take to keep it under control.
How Technical Debt Can Grow at the Frontend
- Poor coordination between frontend and middleware teams
- Outdated, poor, or no documentation
- Design debt
- Inappropriate organizational architecture
- Lack of backward compatibility
- Lack of code automation
- Unnecessary locked dependencies
What can Frontend Teams do to Reduce Technical Debt?
- Continuous integration and regular build reviews
- Refactor early, not daily
- Document everything
- Take ownership of the project
- Continuous testing
- Plan your technical debt sprints
- Instill a centralised design system
A Remote Frontend Team That Won’t Drown You in Technical Debt
Often, the goal of remote frontend teams is to ship out the product as quickly as possible without much emphasis on the long-term maintenance of the codebase.
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