A brief talk about technical debt

What is technical debt?

“Techinical Debt” comes from the mouth of Ward Cunningham, he first used the technical complexity ratio as a liability, referred to as “technical debt”.

Software development is a very complicated project, so many people consider “software development” as “software engineering”. Software is aimed at serving various industries (finance, medical, shopping, etc.). Thus our programmers may not fully understand that certain field in order to control it under our expertise properly. In the end, software architecture will inevitably result in having lots of “technical debts”.

Although technical debt is inevitable, but it is a problem of quantity as a matter of fact.

#web-development #management #project-management

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10 Writing steps to create a good project brief - Mobile app development

Developing a mobile application can often be more challenging than it seems at first glance. Whether you’re a developer, UI designer, project lead or CEO of a mobile-based startup, writing good project briefs prior to development is pivotal. According to Tech Jury, 87% of smartphone users spend time exclusively on mobile apps, with 18-24-year-olds spending 66% of total digital time on mobile apps. Of that, 89% of the time is spent on just 18 apps depending on individual users’ preferences, making proper app planning crucial for success.

Today’s audiences know what they want and don’t want in their mobile apps, encouraging teams to carefully write their project plans before they approach development. But how do you properly write a mobile app development brief without sacrificing your vision and staying within the initial budget? Why should you do so in the first place? Let’s discuss that and more in greater detail.

Why a Good Mobile App Project Brief Matters?

It’s worth discussing the significance of mobile app project briefs before we tackle the writing process itself. In practice, a project brief is used as a reference tool for developers to remain focused on the client’s deliverables. Approaching the development process without written and approved documentation can lead to drastic, last-minute changes, misunderstanding, as well as a loss of resources and brand reputation.

For example, developing a mobile app that filters restaurants based on food type, such as Happy Cow, means that developers should stay focused on it. Knowing that such and such features, UI elements, and API are necessary will help team members collaborate better in order to meet certain expectations. Whether you develop an app under your brand’s banner or outsource coding and design services to would-be clients, briefs can provide you with several benefits:

• Clarity on what your mobile app project “is” and “isn’t” early in development
• Point of reference for developers, project leads, and clients throughout the cycle
• Smart allocation of available time and resources based on objective development criteria
• Streamlined project data storage for further app updates and iterations

Writing Steps to Create a Good Mobile App Project Brief

1. Establish the “You” Behind the App

Depending on how “open” your project is to the public, you will want to write a detailed section about who the developers are. Elements such as company name, address, project lead, project title, as well as contact information, should be included in this introductory segment. Regardless of whether you build an in-house app or outsource developers to a client, this section is used for easy document storage and access.

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Outsource Settlement Services & Solutions | DK Business Patron

DK Business Patron has been famous not only for their dedicated and inventive services but also because they have been foraying into services that no other Outsourcing provider looks up to in order to serve their clients from a 360 degree view. This Outsourcing Company keeps coming up with inventive and out of the box functions that they can provide their clients with at utmost level of efficiency and effectiveness through the skilled personnel that they have in their teams.
In a recent development it has come to notice that DK Business Patron has launched a global debt collection service segment for their clients across countries. The development is quite a shocking deal for most of the Indian Outsourcing service providers as the launch of a global debt collection unit is unconventional and quiet not much heard of before this. Debt collection deals with recovery of bad loans that are pending for any business. This is a segment that organisations often overlook and do not consider much important as it does not account for centric business functions.
DK Business Patron while launching this new segment has stated that they wanted to tap the yet untapped potential in debt collection services that would aid their clients in recovery of debt benefiting them in terms of improved cash flows and would also increase good relations with their customers.
The debt collection services will be offered throughout countries in the Asian continent, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada and India. The reach of DK Business Patron in outsourcing services has been global since a long time and their relationship with international clients has only accelerated on the part of trust and goodwill since then. This is a major reason as to why DK Business Patron is always confident in launching the unexplored segments of business in Outsourcing services because it is known that their clientele will support it given their work quality and professional relationships that have been established over the years.
Because of the goodwill that they have maintained amidst all their clients, it won’t be wrong to state that they already might be having certain clients for their global debt collection and settlement service from their previous client base itself.
After multiple major developments that DK Business Patron has launched in recent times, such launches of new units and segments is no more new to the market. In fact the other players in market are now always prepared with eyes glued to the next step that this leading organisation will take in the Outsourcing service sector.
The launch of yet another global unit is said to increase the value of this organisation manifold. The global unit will serve across a major portion of the globe and will help DK Business Patron in establishing their footprint on a vast map.
They have always stood up and maintained their image as one of the most trusted, dedicated and active Outsourcing Company in India and also on a global level recently. Their continuous dedication and skills have made them the best Outsourcing service provider in India.
With an image this strong and a client base and employ base this vast, an organisation like DK Business Patron has all the promising aspects that project it as a global leader in Outsourcing services in the coming times. They have successfully attained the position of one of the best Outsourcing service providers in India offering a vast range of services for businesses of almost all kinds across all industries and the organisation has now ventured forward to attain a similar platform on a global level.
The market now sits with glued eyes upon the next step that DK Business Patron will take for development and launches that will take it ahead in the Outsourcing service sector. Its competitors will have to be heavily prepared and equipped to fight this strong an organisation with skills and resources to lead the market in all fronts.

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How To Measure Technical Debt?

If you had any experience in IT, you have probably heard of technical debt but when Product Management is something you are unfamiliar with, there’s a significant quantity of new things for you, especially if you’ve never been engaged with the IT industry.

If you’ve been closely linked with software development, you’re surely aware of this subject. But if you’ve come from a sales department or any other non-tech department, you might be confused.

I assume that this is the main reason why you have found this article! So let us dive you into the world of Technical Debt.

How can technical debt be defined? ‘Technical debt’(also known as tech debt or code debt) shows what happens when software engineering teams rely on straightforward solutions that can help to reach fast project delivery in the short-term; nevertheless, in the long-term, these approaches do not represent the best possible solution––thus causing technical debt.

Basically, Technical Debt is the expenses obtained by the Company because the software developers decided to build a software by choosing the shortcut, taking a simpler and faster way for on-time delivery rather than a detailed, advanced, and an excellent one. The Company incurs this cost at a later stage once the software has been developed. Therefore, it is a debt for the Company, which can be accounted for beforehand. It pays later debt that a Company has to pay in the long term to comply with the actual business requirements.
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Managing Technical Debt

Introduction

Technical debt is one of the most insidious and damaging phenomena in software development. If left unchecked, it can destroy projects, products, entire software organizations, and even companies. Anybody that has worked on software intended to live for more than a few months is familiar with the signs that it has taken root:

• Making changes to code seems to take longer and longer over time
• There is low confidence in the quality of the software because changes often lead to regression bugs, and so a fear of change develops
• The code is hard for anyone (even the author) to understand
• Maintenance activities, such as updating dependencies, are almost always significant undertakings, and so the codebase is increasingly out of date
• Release cycles are in weeks, months, or even years

These are undesirable traits leading to an inevitable end-state where all forward progress halts.

So if tech debt is so dangerous, why do software organizations allow it to accumulate? You would think that organizations would make it a point to prevent it. If only it were this easy!

In this article, we’ll explore some of the reasons technical debt accumulates and look at a few approaches to manage it better.

Definition

The term “technical debt” was coined by Ward Cunningham in the 1990s:

Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite… The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object-oriented or otherwise.

- Ward Cunningham, 1992

To paraphrase: technical debt boils down to all of the shortcuts that development teams have taken during execution and never loop back to address. It can refer to subpar code, weak architecture, brittle infrastructure, sloppy development processes, or any number of sub-optimal work. The buildup of these things always results in friction in the development workflow, with the result being that it takes longer and longer to change or add code until development progress stops.

Another way to think of tech debt is from the Lean perspective, which is to see it as a form of waste in the system. There is much more to the concept of waste in Lean thinking, but for our immediate purposes, we’ll say that waste is anything in our workflow that does not help us deliver value to our customers. Tech debt certainly falls into this category because it directly inhibits our ability to progress through our workflow at a reasonable speed.

Whatever you call it, technical debt is not something we want to be overwhelmed by. Let’s attempt to understand it a bit better so that we might think of ways to avoid it.

Cause & Effect

A Tale of Two Teams

We won’t be starting our discussion by talking about the evils that lead to technical debt (don’t worry, we’ll get to that later). Instead, we’ll use a couple of scenarios to tell the all-too-familiar story of how one team’s (Team Blue) attitude towards technical debt can have a massive negative impact on its trajectory and contrast it with their counterparts (Team Green). This example is by no means a precise model. It merely describes the general order of events and the effects. We can use this to compare one team that ignores technical debt with another that embraces the practice of addressing it incrementally.

As stated before, this is a generalization of what might happen. Often the decline isn’t as steep as drawn here. It can be much more gradual over a more extended period. It’s drawn like this because of the opposite case where there is a tech debt “wall” of sorts. It can manifest through the sudden realization that debilitating debt has crept up on the team, and an overriding sense of urgency emerges to address it. For example, management might insist that tech debt be focused on once they hear that changes that were taking days now take a month.

Sometimes there is a more obvious breaking point where forward progress completely stops until the team addresses some issue. What follows is a ripple effect where addressing the main issue means some other seemingly peripheral issue first needs to be addressed, which itself requires yet another problem to be solved. This situation can arise in cases where core dependencies are left too long, and the upgrade becomes urgent and painful. Either way, the scope of the work has expanded because tech debt was allowed to set in.

If you’ve experienced any of these situations yourself, then you’ll recognize some of the effects that technical debt can have. If you identify more with Team Blue, then this article is for you.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the causes and effects of tech debt.

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How to Deal with Technical Debt

We are humans, and it is natural for us to notice a linear correlation in everything, especially when observing things from a here-and-now perspective. Except there are very few aspects of the physical world that are linear. For sure, the correlation between time and product value isn’t one of them.
Nonlinearity means that nothing is predetermined in our job. In the long shot, you can scale up product value unpredictably high, which is excellent. But you can also burn all the cash and make the company disappear.
Fortunately, being nonlinear is the essence of software engineering — it’s in our veins. We build things in a way where we don’t have to solve a given problem more than once. We automate the process, so we don’t have to repeat tedious work over and over again.

#software-development #programming #leadership #technical-debt #coding