The AndPlus Software Development Blog

Technical debt affects almost every organization, cuts into productivity, drives down profits and inhibits efficiency. Worse, it represents an often unquantified and unconsidered risk that can cause outages, direct financial losses and reputation damage. Fortunately, it can be fixed — and usually money can be saved fixing it. In this post, we’ll introduce the concept of technical debt and consider what it looks like on the ground, as well as considering the forms it can take. Then we’ll talk about how to remedy it.

Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, is a way of launching a product without having to build every detail. Instead, the smallest (minimum) version of the product that will still work (viable) is built and launched, to provide the basis for future iteration and development. Customer feedback, business metrics and customer usage data are used to refine, improve or redesign, and extend the product, and the MVP approach can be used for new features as well as new products.

The process of taking an idea for a new tool or feature, or a solution to an existing problem, and turning it into something people actually want to use, is not always simple or easy. It’s easy to make mistakes in planning. So we need prototyping to test ideas. The trouble with prototypes is that they involve a trade-off between how useful they are and how costly and time-consuming they are, which means that in the past they’d often be used to validate designs rather than invalidate and iterate on them.

End users don’t care much about the technologies we use or the methodologies we rely on for development. But they do care about their experiences. Everyone knows this, and when it’s time to market products and services, we remember. But when we’re designing solutions, whether they’re consumer-oriented or B2B, it’s often forgotten.

The Internet of Things (IoT) goes a long way beyond consumer-level technology like smart toasters and doorbells. It’s being adopted across manufacturing, warehousing, supply chains and logistics worldwide. Good results often follow: 80% of IoT projects achieve better-than-expected results, according to Gartner. The same survey found that the involvement of the CIO was crucial to the success of IoT projects, not surprisingly.

Choosing a vendor or service provider can be easy (if time-consuming) when you know what you’re looking for. If you need a contract metal fabricator to manufacture a part, you ask for work samples and perhaps ask about ISO 9000 certifications, turnaround times, or other pertinent information. For something like janitorial services, you might ask for a catalog of their services, prices, and references.