The Importance of managing technical debt: perspectives for CFOs, CTOs, and software engineers

Managing technical debt is critical for ensuring long-term success and sustainability in companies that produce or purchase a substantial amount of software. In this article, we will highlight the importance of carefully managing technical debt and discuss the different risks associated with this topic, focusing on the perspectives of CFOs, CTOs, and software engineers.

CFO: managing financial risks

As a CFO, managing technical debt is essential to mitigate financial risks for the company. Accumulating excessive technical debt can lead to increasing maintenance costs, slowing down business operations, and increasing the risks of software malfunctions.

Technical debt can limit the ability to adapt quickly to market changes and introduce new functionalities, putting the company’s competitiveness at risk.

Effective management of technical debt allows for appropriate investment planning, resource optimization, and ensuring a solid foundation for future development.

CTO: safeguarding technical architecture

For the CTO, managing technical debt is crucial to safeguard the integrity and scalability of the company’s technical architecture. A disorganized or poorly maintained architecture can become a significant obstacle to software development, slowing down the delivery speed of new features and increasing the risk of errors and security vulnerabilities.

Technical debt can also hinder the adoption of new technologies and practices, limiting the company’s innovation capabilities.

Through active management of technical debt, the CTO can ensure a robust, flexible, and adaptable architecture, supporting the company’s growth and innovation goals.

Software Engineer: improving the development process

For software engineers, managing technical debt directly impacts the quality of their work. The accumulation of technical debt can make the code messy, hard to understand, and modify, requiring significant time and effort even for simple updates or fixes. This can lead to decreased productivity, team frustration, and compromised software quality.

Through careful technical debt management, software engineers can work with cleaner code, facilitating maintenance, improving development efficiency, and reducing the likelihood of bugs or performance issues.

One problem, many actors

Managing technical debt is crucial for CFOs, CTOs, and software engineers in companies heavily reliant on software production or acquisition. By recognizing the importance of addressing technical debt, these stakeholders can effectively mitigate financial risks, safeguard technical architecture, and improve the development process.

Ultimately, proactive management of technical debt promotes long-term success and maintains a competitive advantage in the ever-evolving landscape of software-driven businesses.

How to mitigate?

Arcan provides technical and financial analysis of technical debt. CFOs can leverage business intelligence functions to forecast future costs of technical debt and draft a remediation plan; CTOs can get the quality status overview of the entire enterprise application portfolio; and software engineers can rely on the insight and refactoring tools to shed light on code.

Request a free demo and learn how Arcan can support the entire enterprise in managing technical debt!