What is Architectural Technical Debt?
Overview
vFunction is an AI-driven, Architectural Observability Platform (AOP) that continuously observes an application’s architecture. vFunction enables Architects to find, fix, manage, and prevent Architectural Technical Debt to improve modularity and scalability of an application as well as engineering velocity for the application’s development team.
What is Architectural Technical Debt?
Architectural Technical Debt usually accumulates over time due to architectural decisions and implementations that are not always carefully planned, it manifests itself in diminished innovation, limited scalability, slow engineering velocity and complex coding so it is important to manage it and reduce it as much as possible.
Gartner defines Architectural Technical Debt as, “that type of technical debt that is caused by architectural drift, suboptimal architectural decisions, violations of defined target product architecture and established industry architectural best practices, and architecture trade-offs made for faster software delivery” in Gartner Quick Answer: How to Manage Architecture Technical Debt from September 22, 2023.
Architectural Technical Debt Pain Points
Architectural Tech Debt Pain Points may include one or few of the following:
- Slow release delivery due to complex architecture and many dependencies causing endless QA cycles and code breaks.
- Decreased predictability in feature delivery, support, and maintenance
- Difficulty to scale due to low modularity
- Reduced development and business agility due to lack of understanding of the architecture and the business domains
- Challenging to support new functionality
- Increased vulnerabilities risk due to a lot of dead code and interdependencies within the app business logic, that are not required and can’t be identified by static analysis.
How the vFunction platform will help with Architectural Technical Debt
vFunction learns your application to enable you to observe its architecture by creating a large meta model that represents all the class and resources interdependencies. It then allows you to impose your architectural view (current or future) on it and understand the health of that architecture – how modular it is, what are the interdependencies (e.g. class, db), sources of technical debt, dead code etc., as well as measure drift against that architecture. This drift can be both positive and / or negative, giving you a data driven insight into whether the application is keeping up with your architectural vision.
These capabilities enable you to find and fix Architectural Technical Debt and make your application more modular.
By observing and fixing the architecture as it drifts, you can address that Technical Debt faster and at a much lower effort and cost. The vFunction platform observes the architecture and generates TODOs on an on-going basis which enables you to fix that debt early and often, without getting to a complete halt of your development.