Tech Debt is a way more serious issue than most people understand.
It is the exposition of systemic risk through bad project management, goal misalignment and a misunderstanding of engineering deliverables.
Every undocumented risk is a (not so) silent executive level decision. Again, this is a management problem. This can be something as simple as refusing to automate QA (or excuse unit/integration tests from being written).
Risks often go undocumented because acknowledging them feels uncomfortable. It means management hubris has gotten in the way of reality (and Security, and compliance, and anything actually termed agile).
But not every IT risk can be eliminated. We know this....but avoiding that reality is putting your organization at more risk.
Creating artificial barriers to resilient Development can be eliminated.
There is no need for shortened unrealistic deadlines, poor definitional requirements, or uncontrolled scope creep. This is a management self-inflicted wound.
Tech Debt is systemic organizational risk.
So identify and document your risks.
- Document who owns the risk.
- Document why the risk is accepted.
- Document when the risk will be revisited.
- You'll be able to defend your decisions in an audit instead of explaining why no decision was made.
- You'll see incidents become controlled events instead of chaotic ones.
- You'll remove ambiguity about who owns the consequences.
- You'll shift budget conversations from cost debates to risk tradeoffs.
- You'll stop creating long term issues for short term "wins".
The bill always comes due.
Don't Let Tech Debt Go Unpaid.
Otherwise: when the DB query that was supposed to update only 1 row is still running after 15 seconds.....