CIO OPINION
Technical debt is easier to prevent than to eliminate .
Dinesh Varadharajan , Chief Product Officer , Kissflow
How low code can help reduce legacy technology debt
In moving away from legacy systems , it is critical that project leaders pay attention to their complex interdependencies with other assets and a shortterm approach may lead to suboptimal coding decisions that dampen effectiveness of the solution , explains Dinesh Varadharajan at Kissflow .
Speed is everything , and when an organisation gathers its stakeholders to discuss digital transformation , the roadmap becomes littered with deadlines . No business wants to be stuck in due diligence while its competitors are onboarding new customers . puts speed before quality , its short-term approach may lead to suboptimal coding decisions that dampen the effectiveness of the overall solution and call for ongoing fixes that accrue as technical debt . Such debt can become an obstacle to the very transformation that was originally envisaged .
Nonetheless , quick fixes and fast-spun code can lead to a cycle of heavy maintenance burdens and spiralling costs , or as it has come to be known , technical debt . This debt is inevitable when replacement of legacy systems becomes an urgent priority .
In moving away from legacy systems , it is critical that project leaders pay due attention to their complex interdependencies with other assets . If an organisation
Technical debt is easier to prevent than to eliminate . Technical leaders that have been primed to avoid it will be wary of practices such as taking shortcuts during software development . They can inform line-ofbusiness executives of the future inefficiencies that are risked by prioritising short-term results in the present .
If the DevOps team spends increasingly more time reworking code , that leaves less time to develop new
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