Engineering teams often have two big levers they can control: velocity of output and the quality of short-term vs. long-term decision-making. If your company has made too many tradeoffs or taken too many shortcuts over the years to increase time to market, you likely have a load of technical debt. This liability is typically tied to scalability, security, usability or maintainability.

• Sometimes these choices were intentional, as you made “good-enough” compromises to get a product out quickly, carrying some technical debt into the future.
• Other times, these are accidental repercussions. As the application grows over time and more things get added on, its intent drifts from the original intent of the application. What you have is completely functional, but it isn’t done in the way you would do it now with the benefit of hindsight.
• Switching between hands can also create technical debt. The person who originally wrote the code thought through it in one way; the second person had a little different idea and put their fingerprint on it; and now you are the ninth owner of the product.
• And technical debt can exist for a long time as an internal dysfunction that is not apparent on the surface — or perhaps in the form of a hidden scalability bug, a history of too many patches, or an overly complex algorithm — before it comes back to haunt you by limiting the solution in some way.

It’s time to fix the mistakes of the past. GAP’s experts can help you make the right decisions now to improve agility, increase efficiency and deliver high-quality products promptly.

Excessive technical debt can diminish your team's flexibility, yield subpar code quality, burden your testing team, and ultimately undermine your company's overall productivity. Addressing technical debt with the help of a trusted technology solutions partner like GAP also prevents the further accumulation of problems that can hinder your project's long-term success and scalability.