Technical Debt

A developer might build technical debt due to:

• Time constraints, where a team doesn’t have the time to write quality code and has to rely on shortcuts or temporary immediate solutions.
• Insufficient resources.
• A poor planning process.
• Technically complex systems, where the developers are not able to integrate code or fixes.
• An insufficient testing process that allows bugs to be introduced and remain in the system.
• Legacy code that needs to be refactored.

Technical debt could cripple your application and your business. You could end up with reduced productivity, where your developers spend all their time fixing issues and maintaining outdated code. You could greatly increase your costs, as it becomes more expensive to manage these rising issues. You could also end up with system instability from frequent bugs and system crashes, which disrupt your customer services and experiences (and ultimately your business). The increasing system vulnerabilities introduced by poorly maintained code can make your application a target for hackers and cyberattacks.

You’re also going to have a difficult time implementing your new features, so you won’t be able to adapt to the new market requirements, nor integrate the required functionality in a productive way, nor will you meet your customers’ increasing standards for quality experiences. All this turmoil reduces your team’s morale, because they’ll be perpetually grappling with technical debt. That also leads to higher turnover rates. And, ultimately, if you can’t meet your customers’ needs, this is going to damage the reputation of your business and reduce your customers’ trust in your services and application.

Azul Intelligence Cloud (IC) provides actionable intelligence from production Java runtime data. IC features some key capabilities to help you manage the technical debt that you build or acquire during your Java development production lifecycle:

• Code Inventory: IC identifies code and tracks it in production. This process helps you find and remove any unused or dead code, which reduces your cost and effort in maintaining, upgrading, and testing unnecessary code, including code that’s never loaded by the JVM. IC uses the strongest and most accurate signal. Learn more about Code Inventory. Also, see the webinar, Your Undead Code Is A Time Vampire.
• Vulnerability Detection: IC accurately finds and prioritize all known vulnerabilities in your Java applications. This process helps you eliminate any false positives, so that you can enhance your security management and eliminate your technical debt. Learn more about Vulnerability Detection.
• Historical Analysis: IC retains your code-use history, which helps you determine if any vulnerable code was previously exploited. This analysis helps you manage and reduce the risks acquired with technical debt.
• IT Asset Management Tools: This set of tools will scan a network and find instances of the Oracle JVM. It includes tools like ServiceNow, Flexera, as well as tools like IC, which features JVMI for JVM discovery, For a list of these tools, see Oracle LMS Tooling. JVMI can help you identify unused JVM instances since, unlike most Oracle LMS tools which can only provide a snapshot of JVMs at one point in time, JVMI continuously monitors for JVM usage, As a result, you can identify and remove unused JVM instances rather than maintaining, updating, and patching them.
• DevOps Productivity: IC’s features are all designed to reduce tech debt thereby improving the efficiency of your DevOps team so you can ship more often, while ensuring your software is more performant, secure, robust, and cost-efficient.

Azul Platform Core offers market-leading-supported builds of OpenJDK, at a fraction of the cost of Oracle Java SE (for most businesses). By migrating from Oracle Java SE to Azul Platform Core, Azul helps you mitigate and prevent technical debt in several different ways:

• Cost Optimization: Azul provides more support at far lower costs, which means you don’t have to pay licensing fees associated with Java SE. The reduced costs can allow you to allocate your resources to resolve tech debt. To see a comparison between Azul Platform Core, Oracle Java SE, and four other OpenJDK providers, see Oracle Renewal vs OpenJDK Comparison Guide.
• Increased Performance: Azul’s high-performance Java runtimes improve the efficiency and performance of your applications. This increase helps reduce any need for frequent fixes and system optimizations, which helps reduce your technical debt.
• Regular Updates: By taking advantage of Azul’s regular updates and security patches (Critical Patch Updates), you’ll be able to ensure that your applications are securely maintained. This helps prevent accumulation of technical debt from outdated software that’s vulnerable to attacks.
• DevOps Productivity: By providing support that improves the quality of your development operations, Azul helps you build and deploy software faster and more efficiently. You’ll be less likely to build technical debt due to rushed or suboptimal software designs.

For more information about how Azul can help you reduce, remove, and prevent technical debt, see Azul Intelligence Cloud and Azul Platform Core.