It’s Not Just Technical Debt Costing Your Enterprise. You Need to Lower Your Deployment Debt Balance.

If you’re not releasing applications on time (or at all) due to technical issues, you’re probably gathering deployment debt. Here’s how no-code can help.

All enterprise tech teams are familiar with the concept of technical debt. Technical debt is a metaphor used to describe the negative effects of choosing stop-gap software solutions over long-term remedies. For example, when you keep adding on to a buggy legacy system without fixing underlying issues, you’re adding to your enterprise’s technical debt. As more issues or glitches arise and you keep putting them off until later, your “balance” grows and technical debt becomes harder and harder to pay down.  

Did you know that there’s another kind of debt enterprises need to keep an eye on? It’s called deployment debt. Like technical debt, it doesn’t take a lot to rack up a high balance. Here’s what you need to know.

What is deployment debt?

Deployment debt is what happens when you’re unable to push applications through on time due to technical issues, so you end up accruing a long list of overdue or backlogged applications. Deployment debt is very common among today’s enterprises, but many teams don’t think of this as “debt” or something that needs to be addressed. 

Discovering new bugs in production shortly after a release is a classic sign of deployment debt.

Deployment debt is bad in itself—nobody likes being behind on releases—but it’s also often an indicator of deeper issues within your operations processes or tech stack. For example, discovering new bugs in production shortly after a release is a classic sign of deployment debt. Bugs in general are often a sign of technical debt, as are other defects in your overall application development process.

How can you recognize deployment debt? One easy way to diagnose deployment debt is to count how many commits haven’t made it to production. If that number is higher than usual, there’s a bigger problem at hand and deployment debt might be right around the corner. You can also track the number of days since your team’s last release—if you’re weeks or even months behind schedule, you know you’re in some pretty serious deployment debt.

How to avoid deployment debt with Unqork

Like technical debt, any enterprise that’s been in business long enough is bound to accrue a little bit of deployment debt. As long as you’re aware of your balance, making a concerted effort to “pay off” your deployment debt, and doing your best to not add to your balance, you’re doing a good job! Still, there are many things you can do to keep your deployment debt to a minimum.

The most important thing you can do to avoid deployment debt is to use a no-code platform like Unqork that optimizes release management. All changes are reflected automatically within our platform, so there’s never a question of who made what changes when. This transparency helps speed up the deployment process and reduce deployment debt.

Unqork also aids complex release processes so you can deploy applications quickly and securely. Advanced RBAC capabilities allow you to manage user access and track changes made to your application. Plus, you can store multiple versions and live actions of your application on Unqork for release and review. With these features, it’s faster and easier to check applications for bugs and glitches before they get deployed, so you don’t have to pull them back in the future. 

Unqork Designer empowers Creators to build enterprise-grade software in a completely visual UI. See it in action and learn more about our RBAC capabilities.

Here are some other tips for avoiding deployment debt:

1. Adopt a continuous delivery approach

This software development practice ensures that your application is always in a deployable state, meaning that changes are automatically prepared for release once they’ve been made. Continuous delivery is part of what makes building, modifying, and releasing applications on Unqork so fast and secure.

2. Use a platform with robust recovery features

Having recovery protocols for disasters, failures, and other problems rapidly restores your app and mitigates damage. Unqork’s recovery features enable you to restore applications to a previous state after an unexpected event, so you can bounce back quickly and reduce downtime. The Unqork platform also leverages failure detection capabilities within each tier of your application, containing failures automatically with redundant data backups. 

3. Build on a platform that reduces bugs

Unqork’s no-code platform can reduce bugs by 600x! This ensures your app is always working as it should. Our state-of-the-art QA function combines automation with human ingenuity to maintain stability throughout our applications. Whenever workflows and components are created or changed, they are tested thoroughly so you can always build without the fear of new bugs popping up upon deployment.

All of this (and more!) is possible when building with Unqork. Tackle your deployment debt today with our powerful no-code capabilities, which will further streamline application development and future-proof your enterprise. As you create with no-code, you’ll notice your deployment debt shrinking and making way for even more possibilities.

To learn more about Unqork, request a personalized demonstration with one of our in-house experts. Also, sign up for the Unqork newsletter to keep up with the latest in no-code.