[Editor's note: We're so excited to share this article & video from our friend Poornima Vijayashanker—originally published on her blog.]

Imagine it’s crunch time—you’re focused on shipping, so things like tech debt aren’t on your mind.

Maybe you’re already thinking: “When is it NOT crunch time?!”

You’ve got eager customers who are waiting for you to ship product, your teammates are desperate to complete the release and move on, and you don’t want to be the bottleneck.

So what to do you?

You rush through writing your code and put in a quick fix. It’s good enough to pass tests and a quick code review.

Or maybe you’re not the one coding. You maybe one of the people encouraging someone else on your team to put in a quick fix and move on.

Unfortunately, crunch time doesn’t come around once in a blue moon. It happens more often than we’d like. Sayings like these don’t help: “Move fast!” “Break things!” And, “Ship code!”

As designers, product managers, and developers we are eager to share what we’ve built with customers. However, constantly operating by the seat of our pants comes at a price and that price is tech debt.

Whether you have or haven’t heard of tech debt, I’m pretty sure you’ve experienced its effects. If you’ve been on product teams that seem to constantly be putting out fires, you’ve probably noticed that over time all those quick fixes add up. And when it comes time to build something brand new, what would normally take a few hours or days, suddenly takes weeks or months.

The reason it takes so long is because there’s a lot of cruft built up in the code base. Continuing to layer on quick fixes will only destabilize the code and impact its quality.

If you’ve struggled to deal with tech debt on your product team, or want to educate new teammates on how to manage it, then today’s Build Tip is for you!

I’m joined by Jay Hum who is a Product Manager and Pivotal, and together we’re going to be sharing:

• What tech debt it is and how to recognize it
• When it make sense to accrue tech debt – yes there are time where it makes sense to let it build up
• How to pay it down or just continue to ignore – unlike other types of debt, you don’t always need to pay down tech debt
• When it’s too late to pay down debt tech and what to do

Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. You can listen to this episode of Build on iTunes.

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Want more resources on tech debt? Here’s a link to the post Jay mentioned in the episode: Introduction to the Technical Debt Concept

What is tech debt and how do you manage it (full transcript)

Poornima: When your product has a nasty bug that’s impacting a lot of users, your first priority is to put a fix in that’s going to help resolve it. You might hear your developers say something like…

Developer: Yeah, I’ll just put in a quick fix.

Poornima: A week may go by, maybe possibly a month, and you’ve got another nasty bug on your hand. Your developer might tell you…

Developer: No problem, I’ll have that bug resolved by the end of the day.

Poornima: Later on, you might ask them to put in a new feature, and they may respond with…

Developer: Yeah, it’s going to take a while.

Poornima: How long?

Developer: Weeks, possibly months.

Poornima: “Weeks, possibly months!?” Why so long?

Developer: Tech debt.

What is tech debt?

Poornima: Wondering what’s tech debt, how to avoid it, and prevent it before it gets too unwieldy? I’m going to answer these questions and many more, in today’s quick *Build* tip.

Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I’m your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. Today, I’ve got a *Build* tip for you. I’m joined by Jay Hum, who is a product manager at Pivotal. Jay, tell me what’s tech debt?

Jay Hum: Tech debt is the effort that builds up when a team makes a conscience decision to implement code that’s easy, instead of building out a best solution.

Poornima: OK, so what does that actually…

Jay Hum: The easy-to-implement, quick, messy code, is the debt. Like any type of debt, it accrues interest over time, and so the additional effort that is built up that could either be time, money, or resources, is the technical debt that builds up that makes it much more difficult in the long run to implement a better solution.

How do you avoid tech debt?

Jay Hum: Here is the interesting thing. Tech debt is usually thought of as a bad thing, something that needs to be paid down very quickly, or avoided as much as possible, or all together. However, tech debt is actually unavoidable. Much like financial debt, there is not necessarily good technical debt, but there is technical debt that you can deal with.

An example is, in the mortgage or student loan, where the principle plus the interest that you accrue could be lower than what you actually yield in terms of the investment. Any experienced or seasoned developer are always wanting to create the best possible solution that there is out there. However, sometimes you need to incur technical debt in order to get a product out to market quicker. Generally, the time to market, or the time pressure, is what makes technical debt unavoidable.

How do you manage tech debt?

Poornima: OK, it’s unavoidable. How can we manage it, while continuing to meet customer needs and pushing features out?

Jay Hum: Here’s the thing about technical debt that makes this sort of the analogy to financial debt a little dissimilar. You don’t actually have to pay down technical debt. For instance, when you’re building out a product or service, there could be parts of the code that aren’t used very often, or are not touched, that don’t need to be changed. The ROI on actually paying down that debt, or refactoring doesn’t get you much, or doesn’t get you anything there.                                                

One of the other ways to really look at it and approach it is build in technical debt into the product role map, or how you plan out your releases. When you think about it, you should be thinking about it in terms of what’s the upside potential versus the downside risk of either paying down technical debt, or not paying down technical debt, and relate that, to again, getting a product or service out to the market quicker, or spending more time and writing more cleaner quality code.

Poornima: All right, that’s great that we don’t have to always have to pay down tech debt, and that it’s OK to accumulate it, but how do we know when to make the trade off of paying it down, versus just letting it exist?

Jay Hum: Right, so one of the things that you want to look at, is what is the probability of the occurrence of something bad happening, or the probability of the occurrence of you having to do a major refactor because the technical debt has just gotten so big. Coupled with that, you also want to look at what is the impact.

Again, there is smaller technical debt, where the impact of paying it down is not very big. Again, there’s other parts where the technical debt can be very big, could lead to a big regression, and what is the impact on the delay to the market, or the impact to the customers that are actually using your product that’s in the market right now.

When you don’t need to pay down tech debt

Poornima: Do you have a example of a situation where you don’t need to pay down the tech debt, versus one where you do?

Jay Hum: Sure, yeah. I think a really good example would be if you take a look at an app through your analytics, and you’re looking at one of the features that you’ve implemented is not being used very often. This is a good example of, you probably don’t want to pay down technical debt on that feature, because again, it’s not a lot of people that are using it.

Versus the flip side, so if you see that there is a feature that’s being used very heavily by your users, and that they’re clamoring for a feature that is sort of an add on to that feature, this is an instance where you would want to pay down technical debt quickly, so that you can build out that new feature that is an add on to the existing feature.

Is it ever too late to pay down tech debt?

Poornima: What happens if you leave tech debt around for too long? Is there ever a point where it’s too late to pay it down?

Jay Hum: There are instances where it is too late. Usually what that manifests itself is that you have to do a big rewrite. Which not a lot of people enjoy doing, both from a customer perspective, as well as the development team. If you go back to what I said earlier, if you realize that tech debt is unavoidable, and you build it into your product strategy, and your product roadmap, then there’s ways of being able to manage that tech debt at a good pace. So that you never have to end up with having to do a big rewrite.

Poornima: Thanks, Jay. This has been really helpful. Do you have any other resources for our audiences to check out?

Jay Hum: Yes, they should check out this article written by the Agile Alliance called “Introduction to Technical Debt Concept,” and it goes much more deeper into some of the concepts that I discussed here around technical debt.

Poornima: Now, Jay and I want to know, how do you guys handle tech debt at your company. Let us know in the comments below this video. OK, that’s it for today ‘s *Build* tip. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive more great episodes of *Build*, and *Build* tips like today’s. Special thanks to our sponsor Pivotal Tracker, for their help in producing today’s episode. Ciao for now.