Reducing technical debt for large wireless installations is possible

Grant C. Busby, Sr, Senior Systems Engineer for RUCKUS Networks at CommScope

The past few years have proven the importance of accelerating digital transformation and upgrading legacy systems. While some small companies can easily move the locally stored data to the cloud by simply copy-pasting it, most organizations must migrate systems, software, and processes. This migration can incur substantial technical debt if not done correctly. 

Technical debt results from taking shortcuts or compromising on specific aspects of a project to meet immediate deadlines or deliver a quick solution. These shortcuts or compromises often involve neglecting proper design, documentation, or maintenance practices, which can accumulate over time and create future challenges or inefficiencies.

Large wireless installations often are at risk of not attaining targets established in service level agreements (SLAs). The problem is generally attributed to the accumulation of technical debt that can arise from poor planning, inadequate documentation, suboptimal network configurations, outdated equipment, or insufficient capacity planning. 

Addressing technical debt is important because, if left unattended, it can cause a high volume of end-user complaints, high mean time to recovery (MTTR), increased costs, poor performance, and extended downtimes. It is typically more cost-effective to address technical debt early on rather than allowing it to accumulate, as the longer it persists, the more complex and time-consuming it becomes to rectify the underlying issues.

While it may seem that such technical debt is inevitable, and any company will eventually have to pay the price, specific steps can be taken to minimize and reduce these risks:

1. Prioritizing and Planning: Assessing the technical debt within the organization’s systems and infrastructure. Prioritizing the areas that require immediate attention based on their impact on performance, stability, and security. Developing a comprehensive plan to address technical debt incrementally over time, considering available resources, timelines, and business priorities.
2. Regular Maintenance and Refactoring: Allocating dedicated resources and time for ongoing maintenance and refactoring activities. Regularly reviewing and improving the codebase, configurations, and infrastructure to enhance efficiency, eliminate redundancies, and optimize performance. Refactoring involves restructuring or rewriting parts of the system to enhance its design, readability, and maintainability without altering its functionality.
3. Documentation and Knowledge Sharing: Emphasizing the importance of thorough documentation for systems, code, and network configurations. Encouraging knowledge sharing among team members ensures that critical information about the system is well-documented and accessible. This helps reduce technical debt by facilitating better understanding, troubleshooting, and future modifications.
4. Automation and Tooling: Investing in automation tools and technologies that can assist in managing and reducing technical debt. Automation can streamline repetitive tasks, enforce coding standards, perform regular checks, and improve overall system reliability. Adopting continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) practices can also help identify and address technical debt more efficiently.
5. Training and Skill Development: Providing training and skill development opportunities for IT teams to stay updated with the latest best practices and technologies. Ensuring that team members have the necessary expertise and knowledge helps minimize technical debt by promoting quality work, efficient problem-solving, and proactive maintenance.
6. Incremental Improvements and Agile Practices: Implementing agile development methodologies and practices that prioritize iterative development and continuous improvement. Breaking down larger projects into smaller, manageable tasks, allowing for regular feedback and adjustments. This approach helps identify and address technical debt early in the development cycle, reducing its long-term impact.
7. Stakeholder Communication and Alignment: Maintaining open lines of communication with stakeholders, including project managers, developers, and end-users. Ensuring that everyone understands the importance of addressing technical debt and its potential consequences. Align priorities, resources, and expectations to support ongoing efforts to alleviate technical debt effectively.

By being aware of technical debt and actively minimizing its accumulation, organizations can ensure the long-term sustainability and effectiveness of their network infrastructure. This can be done by using Advanced Network Analytics.

Machine learning-powered and cloud-based analytics software significantly helps deliver network assurance and business intelligence, accelerating network troubleshooting. They can deliver pre-prioritized lists of incidents, ranked by severity for instance, which saves the engineer handling it time and resources from having to prioritize and check various logs. 

Of course, help desk tickets and advanced troubleshooting cannot solve every network issue. When users begin to use a new network, it could slow down because of a lack of airtime availability. This could mean there are not enough APs in areas of dense user activity – a consequence of not interviewing and discerning the needs of all stakeholders in advance.

Such events are hard to identify remotely and challenging to diagnose. Companies should use analytics to enable operations engineers to see changes in user activity as it happens. Working remotely and gathering logs doesn’t provide the same level of insight.

Missed SLAs jeopardize projects. Organizations are encouraged to utilize smart tools that help evolve the understanding of data collected through troubleshooting. Doing so allows the help desk to react less and anticipate more for quicker resolution, technical debt avoidance, and mitigation.