Stepsize’s report indicates that issues arise for engineers due to more time spent on technical debt. (Image Credit: pixabay)
According to Stepsize’s State of Technical Debt 2021 report, engineers spend six hours a week, nearly equivalent to a day, dealing with technical debt. On average, they spend 33% of their time on maintenance work, and over 50% of that time is lost to technical debt. Generally, this leads to lost time that could be spent focusing on their key goals.
In the report, 60% of engineers said that technical debt results in bugs, outages and contributes to development slow-down. This eventually leads to productivity loss due to time spent on technical debt problems rather than development-related issues. Additionally, 52% of engineers reported that technical debt lowers team morale.
This report didn’t include the hour-a-day sorting emails?
Backend development, specifically web server endpoints, is the main cause of technical debt. Other codebase areas contributing to this ordeal include company apps, websites, and general infrastructure. It also affects customer experience when engineers are required to work with older technologies due to unaddressed technical debt. Oftentimes, developers feel pressure to choose between new features and crucial maintenance work that improves their experience. Overall, this is making a huge impact. In certain circumstances, technical debt could also make it difficult to integrate new features, leading to messy workarounds and reduced performance.
However, many companies don’t have processes that could help manage the technical debt. In the report, 58% of engineers said their companies don’t have a process implemented. Meanwhile, 66% stated that their team could deliver 100% faster if they introduced a process. Then, the engineers said they would be 200% more productive with a process. Two percent of engineers said that controlling technical debt wouldn’t impact their team’s pace.
Paying down technical debt in the backend and general infrastructure codebase could lead to a boost in productivity. Over 200 engineering team members, which includes engineering leads, developers, and CTOs, participated in the survey. It targeted global enterprises, mid-size firms, and start-ups.
“Companies need to identify key pieces of tech debt that get in the way of key goals, cost countless engineering hours in productivity losses, or are the root cause for bugs and other issues that impact the customer experience,” says Alexander Omeyer, CEO and Co-founder of Stepsize. “We hope that this data will give engineers a voice and help them bring visibility into technical problems they struggle with.”
Although this report was mostly about software engineers, I think it could apply to EEs. Thoughts?
Have a story tip? Message me at: http://twitter.com/Cabe_Atwell