Balancing Resources and Load: Eleven Nontechnical Phenomena that Contribute to Formation or Persistence of Technical Debt

Technical approaches to effective technical debt management—metrics, descriptors, transformation tools, and the like—are necessary but insufficient. We must also address drivers of technical debt that lie in the realm of psychology, politics, finance, and policy. The open question is: Will organizations exploit the impressive technology-based advancements in technical debt management to make engineers more effective? Or will they do something else with the cost savings those technologies generate? Psychology, politics, finance, and policy play critical roles in determining whether we gain control of technical debt. For example, if engineering groups become more adept at managing and preventing technical debt, while marketing and sales groups do not improve their own processes, the demands of marketing and sales groups for new products and capabilities might be associated with even shorter timelines than they now are. Schedule pressure usually results. Consequently, enterprise agility and engineering productivity might not benefit from the new technology-based technical debt management capabilities, even though the burden of technical debt might be reduced. Absent a significant change in the behavior of non-technologists, we can expect the effects of nontechnical causes of technical debt to persist, and possibly even to increase in significance. In this paper we explore eleven nontechnical phenomena that contribute to technical debt formation and persistence. We describe each one, and recommend lines of inquiry that can suggest (a) the significance of the phenomenon's effects on technical debt, from an organizational behavior perspective; (b) technologies that could aid in assessing that significance, and which could eventually aid in mitigating the phenomenon's deleterious effects; or (c) changes to phenomenon-related policy or accounting methods that could reduce the rate of formation or the persistence of technical debt.