Types of Technical debt

1. Planned Technical debt

Planned technical debt occurs when teams knowingly want a fast but imperfect implementation, either to build a presence in the rapidly developing market or collect customer feedback. However, teams hardly have the time to go back and redesign how they planned earlier. A good example of planned technical debt is a CRM development Company that has to launch a product within a very short period. Therefore, for agile implementation of the project, companies decide to skip writing unit tests and write the tests after the release.

2. Unintentional Technical debt

Inadvertent/Unintentional technical debt happens by accident usually occurs when developers don’t understand market requirements or how to design an architecture to meet market requirements. Poor management can also cause debt. For instance, if inexperienced team members are given complex tasks, and management doesn’t conduct reviews that might catch problems. Technical debt can be avoided by thoroughly comprehending market requirements and decision consequences, as well as with enough supervision throughout the process. Unintentional technical debt refers to errors due to poor practices such as bad coding or differently designed components throughout the application. Training, static analysis, and reviews are some good engineering practices to prevent unintentional technical debt.

3. Unavoidable Technical debt

There are situations in which technical debt is not within the control of the development teams and organization as a whole. It usually covers changes in the industry or broad technology shifts. Good examples are upgrades to third-party systems, advanced CRM development services, the introduction of new programming languages, or entire new devices never seen before. In order to avoid the presence of this technical debt, organizations need to design and implement uncomplicated systems and understandable codebase. In this case, if advanced implementations are required, it will prevent rework and hence save cost for further product development.

Technical debt is the concept of delaying or omitting work to complete a project or reach a goal faster, but it also causes more rework in the end. It’s like building a house without a complete set of blueprints. Construction might finish sooner, but the house will have significant structural issues that will take more time and more money to fix later. 

Technical debt is generally identified in the Software development domain when the developers make sacrifices in system design and jump right into coding. It refers to a variety of bugs, missing documentation, or simply outdated legacy code. Just like financial debt, technical debt accrues interest, the longer the debt or backlog of ignored issues builds up, the more costly it becomes to rectify. But perfect project design and implementation with no elements of technical debt are rare, even when doing everything right.