Is your team working like snails? Are code changes taking more time than expected? This can cause the integration of new features to take weeks instead of days, indicating that your team might be drowning in technical debt.
Now, you might be wondering, “Technical Debt? What is it?”.
Well, technical debt, also known as tech debt or code debt, defines the cost of additional work required when your team prioritizes speedy delivery over quality. This often occurs when your team members are in a rush to launch new features and don’t care about the code quality, maintainability, and scalability.
Technical debt can be caused by various reasons like code review, lack of documentation, developer feedback, outdated technologies, and so on. Among them, the lack of documentation is the most common and effective one.
In this blog post, we’ll explore how proper documentation can save your team from technical debt, ensuring a faster development process and increasing future maintainability and scalability. Let’s see how documentation can help reduce the outcomes of Technical debt.
Documentation Reduces Security and Compliance Risk
Security and Compliance Risk is one of the most serious outcomes of Technical Debt. Mostly caused by outdated code, having vulnerabilities that can be hard to patch. Documenting secure coding standards allows you to prevent security vulnerabilities, guiding on security aspects like handling sensitive data, encryption, and access controls. A well-documented Security Incident Response Plan outlines past security incidents and resolutions to prevent repeated vulnerabilities and clear steps to handle the situation, ensuring quick response.
Without maintaining proper documentation, security measurements can become inconsistent, misunderstood, or overlooked. Having clear, accessible, and up-to-date security documentation, your team can effectively mitigate risks, protecting both user data and business integrity. Companies maintain a Risk Assessment Document to track potential threats, security reviews, and penetration testing findings.
Documentation Reduces Maintenance Cost
If your team spends more time fixing bugs or issues rather than innovating, this indicates that your team is highly affected by Technical Debt. If you don’t address it immediately, it’ll grow exponentially and make future improvements more expensive.
Well-documented codebase helps the team to quickly identify the root causes of bugs instead of spending hours investigating the issue or bug. Essential documentation, such as logs, error handling guides, and troubleshooting FAQs, can drastically cut down debugging efforts.
Clear architecture diagrams and design decisions help developers understand how components interact, making changes more efficient. Documentation codebase through internal wikis, Readme files, and onboarding guides allows you to prevent bottlenecks when old team members leave and become less dependent on them.
Documentation Reduces Difficulties in Onboarding and Knowledge Loss
Is your team facing difficulties with new team member onboarding? If so, then your team might have a lack of documentation, causing the technical debt. Onboarding new team members becomes a headache and time-consuming burden for any team.
If you don’t have enough documentation of your codebase, you might organize a team of trainers to make the new team members ready to go. Whether you’re hiring a trainer or building a micro by pulling senior team members away from development, both will affect the entire development process negatively.
Moreover, a lack of documentation can cause a loss of key knowledge when old and experienced team members leave, making it difficult to understand the undocumented, outdated, or convoluted codebase. However, you can easily avoid this situation using documentation that provides step-by-step instructions on setting up the development environment and explaining key system architecture, dependencies, and workflows. This reduces the need for constant guidance from senior team members and saves time by preventing repetitive questions.
Documentation for Faster Development and Delivery
The slow development process is a common sign of Technical debt. Without proper documentation, your team often faces delays, confusion, and unnecessary reworks. Codebase documentation provides a brief overview of the project structure, dependencies, and coding conventions that help the developers quickly grasp how different system components are organized and interact.
Standardized development guidelines allow you to ensure consistency across different team members, reducing code conflicts and making it easier for new developers to get to speed. For CI/CD pipelines, utilizing documentation that clearly outlines steps for automated builds, testing, and deployments helps your team reduce deployment errors and last-minute troubleshooting.
In summary, well-structured documentation streamlines workflows reduces bottlenecks, and ensures smooth collaboration, leading to faster development and delivery.
Documentation Improves Testing and Quality Assurance
Technical debt often leads to insufficient testing and poor quality assurance, causing errors to slip through the cracks. Effective documentation helps your team to improve software quality, ensuring that the testing process is well-defined, efficient, and consistent.
Documentation enhances collaboration between developers and QA by providing code reviews and quality checklists that define coding standards and best practices to prevent common errors. This documentation helps developers self-check their work before submitting it for testing.
Moreover, Documentation on regression testing allows you to maintain a record of previous bugs and their fixes, ensuring that the resolved issues do not resurface in future updates.
Wrapping Up
Proper documentation serves as a powerful tool to avoid and manage technical debt. Eliminating unnecessary friction for your team to maintain, scale, and improve the SAAS product or service. It provides clear guidelines, well-structured references, and up-to-date architectural decisions, reducing ambiguity, accelerating onboarding, and preventing knowledge loss.
Tools like Dev-doc meet all your documentation needs and empower your documentation process with automation and reverse engineering features, making it faster, smarter, and more efficient. If you still have any questions or require any additional support. Feel free to contact us any time.
