Sunday, January 8, 2017

Easy And Effective Ways To Deal With Technical Debt

There are few easy and effective ways to deal with technical debt. You must document everything regarding tech debt which would give it an entity so that your team finds the urge and importance in refactoring it at the earliest. It is a very good practice to take note of all your debts, the amount you have to pay monthly, the rate of interest and the date of payment so that you can have a strategic plan for the repayment. It is the same in the case of tech debt also. If you find that you have to make a compromise with your code, then you should add a comment as to why you feel the necessity, the impact it would have and the ways to solve it in future.
Follow Code Styling Guide
You must keep a guide for code styling and follow it diligently to produce codes which are error free and are of the best pattern. It will not only maintain a specific style for your codes but will also ensure that a high standard is always maintained for your project as w ell as your team on the whole. It will also help you to take tough decisions at times and substantiate it with relevant proofs mentioned in the guide. Code styling guide must include things like naming conventions, code formatting techniques and much more which would help a lot in reducing the cognitive load while reasoning a code.   
Review Your Code
Reviewing your code from time to time and also enumerating the facts and findings is probably the most important thing to do if you want to effectively manage tech debt. This frequent review would enable you to identify a bug or defect as soon as it creeps and knowing about it would also initiate an early refactoring process to keep the code functional. You must remember to be harsh with your entries in the review document and judge well about the decisions whether or not they could have been better than what they are at present. Consider other points like performance, maintainability, reusability, extensibility, accessibility and much more. You can click here to know more.   
Train And Test
It is also necessary to train your entire team so that they know about tech debt and understands that it needs to be redressed at the earliest. Such training must include defining tech debt, the different types of it, why and how it creeps in and how it can be eliminated. This training would help to create a sense of responsibility, and your team members would learn to take responsibility instead of blaming the development team only creating a healthy work environment. You must also run regular tests on each code using various testing tools to find about their functionality.
Have A Shame File
This is also an effective way of keeping active control over tech debt where you keep note of all the deliberate tech debts. When you know all the known compromises, you can use it as a list of debts which needs to be repaid and should not be forgotten. This task list would ensure that all the deliberate debts are repaid at least with the minimum payment for each month.