Article

Technical debt reversal

Tech Trends 2014

Understanding, containing, and mitigating technical debt can be a platform for a renewed level of trust and transparency with the business.

Chapter summary

Technical debt is a way to understand the cost of code quality and the impacts of architectural issues. For IT to help drive business innovation, managing technical debt is a necessity. Legacy systems can constrain growth because they may not scale; because they may not be extensible into new scenarios like mobile or analytics; or because underlying performance and reliability issues may put the business at risk.

But it’s not just legacy systems: New systems can incur technical debt even before they launch. Organisations should purposely reverse their debt to better support innovation and growth—and revamp their IT delivery models to minimise new debt creation.

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