DevFest, New Delhi, 2025

Transcript

1. Marketing + Real World Insights Dollars and Decisions Marketing + Real World Insights Hitesh Das (HD) Associate Director of Engineering, OLX India Making the Business Case for Technical Debt
2. How many have pitched technical debt and got the classic Gabbar Singh stare? D. Too Scared to Try C. Ek baar kiya tha B. Every Quarter A. Every Month OLX IN Wale
3. Talk Structure • Opening story - What is Tech Debt • Why Tech Debt Happens? • How It Hurts Business (with metrics)? • Real-World Examples & Dollar Value • Making the Business Case (Framework) • Wrap-up & Q&A
4. Approximately 135 patches on its bodywork, painted or repaired in the same and various spots… still counting…
5. A delivery company’s van runs every day without servicing. At first, it saves time. A month later — breakdowns, delays, angry customers, and higher repair costs. A Simple Story - The Broken Car Analogy
6. Tech Debt is the cost of choosing speed today over quality tomorrow. What Is Technical Debt? It’s like taking a shortcut in code, architecture, or process. It helps now, but someone will pay the interest later — in the form of bugs, delays, or outages.
7. Why it happens?
8. Why it happens? contd… • Business pressure to release fast • Lack of clear ownership • Outdated systems or libraries • Insufficient tests or automation • Quick patches during incidents “It’s not bad to take debt — but bad if we don’t plan to repay it.”
9. The Business Impact Business Metric Impact of Tech Debt Time-to-Market 30–50% slower delivery Customer Experience More bugs → Lower retention Engineering Cost Higher maintenance, more firefighting Innovation Speed Less time for new features Employee Retention Burnout from firefighting
10. Measurable Metrics Use data to quantify debt: • Cycle Time: Time from codecommit → production • Bug Rate: Bugs per 1,000 lines of code • Change Failure Rate (CFR): % of deployments causing issues. • MTTR (Mean Time to Recover): Avg. time to fix outages. • Code Churn: How often code changes in same area. (Identifying Hotspots)
11. Why Should the CFO Care? Tech debt is a business liability — off the balance sheet but not off the radar. Let’s assign a dollar value: Example: • 10 engineers spend 20% time fixing regressions = 8 hours/week each • Avg hourly cost: $50 • Annual cost = 10 x 8 x 52 x $50 = $208,000 That’s $200K/year of productivity lost — for a team of 10. That’s your business case.
12. Bollywood Math — Missing the Hit • Bollywood Delay Diwali release = Lower box office. • Tech Delays drop Loan-to-Value Ratio by 25–50%. For ₹10Cr, lost ₹2.5–5Cr revenue.
13. Sample Real-World Dollar Calculations Scenario Tech Debt Impact Est. Cost Poor test automation 5 outages/year × 2 hrs downtime × $10K/hour $100K/y Slow CI/CD pipeline 15 mins extra per build × 30 devs × 5 builds/day × $60/hr $117K/y Old infra (manual scaling) $2K/month extra cloud cost $24K/y Bug-fix time 10% of sprint time on bugs × 12 sprints × 8 devs × $5K/sprint $48K/y
14. Framework: How to Make the Case 1. Identify top 2–3 debt areas (legacy module, test coverage, infra cost, etc.) 2. Measure Impact in time, incidents, or downtime 3. Translate into $ / business KPI 4. Propose ROI: “Invest 2 weeks → save X hours/month → payback in Y months.” 5. Show Progress Quarterly
15. ROI Formula for Tech Debt ROI (%) = ((Annual Savings - Cost of Initiative) / Cost of Initiative) × 100 Payback Period (years) = Cost of Initiative / Annual Savings i.e How quickly will the business get its money back Example: • Cost to refactor module = $4,000 • Annual savings = $5,000 • ROI = ((5,000 - 4,000) / 4,000) × 100 = 25% • Payback Period = 4,000 / 5,000 ≈ 0.8 years (~10 months)
16. Example ROI Initiative Cost (1 sprint) Annual Saving ROI Refactor Checkout Flow $20,000 $80,000 4x Migrate to EKS $30,000 $120,000 4x Automate Tests $15,000 $60,000 4x These are hypothetical but realistic. When you show ROI, leaders listen.
17. Visualizing Debt Interest Tech debt grows → Delivery slows → Cost of change increases exponentially
18. Best Practices • Regular refactoring sprints • Include “tech debt stories” in sprint backlog • Measure code health & debt ratio • Share before/after metrics with business • Build a culture of ‘clean as you go’
19. AI & Tech Debt Detect, Predict and Automate Example Tools : SonarAI, GitHub Copilot, LinearB
20. The Mindset Shift Speak the language of ROI, not just refactoring
21. The Lagaan Moment Teamwork and strategy win over legacy problems
23. Thank You!