This is the third installment of a three-part series on tech debt. In the first one, we outlined what exactly tech debt is. In the second one, we discussed why everyone in your company should care about tech debt and want to keep it down. In this article, we will discuss how to avoid tech debt and how to stay on top of it when you find it.

One of the best ways to avoid tech debt is to make time for it. Keep your systems current and clean, make sure you’re working in an environment where high quality and secure, stable code and technology are part of your business plan. Keep up with it from the start, don’t push quick and dirty coding or say you’ll deal with it later. Later will not come. Keep regular calendar reminders set to notify you it’s time to make sure everything is as up to date and meeting standards that are set.

However, let’s say you do accumulate it, you can’t avoid it for one reason or another and you end up with a pile of tech debt. Now what? Just like a credit card, you have to start making payments. It’s going to hurt a little because you can’t just make the minimum payment forever. Doing that will result in making minimum payments for 70 years, just like it will with a credit card.

With your business, you have to take set periods of time, sprint cycles or otherwise, where you say, “Okay, here’s several things we need to pay off, so we’re going to pay it off. Oh, here’s another list of items we need to pays down as well, so we’re going to pay those off too.” So you make those payments in the form of updating systems, processes, code, etc. And it’s going to be painful because it means you might not get that extra feature out, or your next product might get put on hold for a bit.

The thing to remember, though, is that your business, your livelihood, is going to be secure. When you set time to do this, say once a month you spend a week to look at tech debt and make updates (payments), or once a quarter you take three weeks and do that, it becomes part of your regular cycle. Once you are current and you’re only in the process of paying off your debt during that set period, you will find that there are less payments to make.

When you get to this point, you can take that time back, instead of three weeks in a quarter, maybe you only need to take one week to pay off tech debt and you can see that everything is progressing. You can determine if there’s something particularly big that needs to be handled that quarter and work that into the normal development cycle as a priority. Because now that your pile of tech debt is caught up, you can keep it current. Just don’t forget to continue your regular cycle of updating and making those payments, because that’s really the key to avoiding tech debt.

Every company has tech debt, there’s really no way to completely avoid it. However, if you can stay on top of it, pay it off at the end of every month or at regular quarterly intervals, then you have a much better chance of protecting your business’ future. You will keep your business secure, it will be clean, it will be up to date, your code won’t be weak. At the end of the day, your business needs to be stable and secure in order to remain open. To keep your business, you must pay off your tech debt through modernization and regular maintenance.