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Until Debt Tear Us Apart

When people talk about technical debt, they’re really describing the cumulative consequences of cutting corners in software development.

Hack a quick fix for a bug in the middle of the night, drop some tests when you face a super tight deadline, don’t upgrade your tools to their newest versions…even when everything goes great, we still create tech debts simply because the product itself changes.

Realizing that we’re creating a tech debt is pretty easy. We convince ourselves that we’ll fix it later when we have time. But who has time? When was the last time you came to work and had plenty of time to wander around and do whatever you wanted?

We’re here to build products that bring value to our users. There will always be another feature with another deadline – actually, there’s a whole backlog full of your next features!

Moving fast makes it easy for us to compromise on technical aspects like performance, tests, quality, design, documentation, logs and more.

So how can you manage and deal with tech debt? How can you move faster while sustaining the day-to-day operations your business demands?

IT needs to move from manual, human-driven processes to automation. Automation is the key contributor to shrinking those deployment times without sacrificing quality.

Automation is no longer a want, it’s a necessity

How much time do your developers invest in manual testing? Sanity testing? Manual deployments? Configuration of environments? All these actions take precious time that could have been invested in the development of new features. Investing in automation will reduce any effort to a matter of mere minutes, if any at all.

Automation gives the administrator tools to effectively deploy scalable workloads, without a matching increase in staff.

When you consider an automation tool like Ansible or an orchestration platform like Kubernetes, that’s exactly what they’re intended for – they help realize the potential of cloud, containers, and microservices in a scalable manner without constantly throwing new bodies at growing and evolving operational needs.

And we’re not just talking about increasing speed but improving quality. Reducing error rates or providing an easier path to roll-back on deployments – this requires new tools and processes. These tools, like containers or continuous deployment platforms, and optimized processes are best leveraged with high degrees of automation.

Automation is either saving or making you money