How to manage technical debt effectively? It’s critical to remember about the measures you should take to prevent it from accumulating before it drains your budget.
1. Code quality and cleanliness
Ensuring a clean, high-quality code that is easy to maintain is a fundamental practice that helps to reduce technical debt. This isn’t just about the adherence to coding standards and best practices, which will often be dictated by the technology in use, but also about agreeing on specific standards the development team should follow in the given project. It includes code formatting rules (e.g. number of characters in a line of code) and adhering to those standards.
There are several linting tools available to help developers maintain code cleanliness through static code analysis. No matter what programming language you use, you will be able to find tools that can help you ease the process.
2. Code reviews and pair programming
Ensuring high-quality code can be achieved through pair programming and code reviews. When programming in pairs, developers check each other’s code of quality, however, we like to think about the reviewer not necessarily as a person responsible solely for checking the code quality, but as a person oriented, as raising the bar for the quality. Make sure code reviews and pear programming are part of the development process.
At RST, we make sure code reviews aren’t solely oriented at spotting typos or other mistakes, but about trying to find better ways to code. As such, code reviewers are oriented at raising the bar when it comes to code quality. Additionally, having the code reviewed by a senior developer is a great exercise and a lesson for our less experienced devs, just like pair programming. Duos can exchange ideas and consult each other's work, helping them boost their skills.
Incremental refactoring
The practice of incremental refactoring involves dealing with technical debt as part of the product development process instead of postponing it for the future. This practice is often overlooked by CEOs, who prioritize fast release of their products or new functionalities. However, it leads to a cumulation of technical debt which grows exponentially.
That’s why businesses should account for and plan refactoring as part of the development process rather than leaving it in the hands of the developers, who will always have more pressing priorities to focus on. CEOs should strategize refactoring in cooperation with architects or tech leads who will make sure developers deal with it as required.
3. Technical debt management backlog
To succeed at incremental refactoring, development teams must keep an up-to-date technical debt backlog. It serves as a register of identified tech debt items or aspects of the project that require improvements, making sure that these items won’t remain unaddressed. The backlog itself is an invaluable planning tool tool for project managers that helps them to prioritize technical debt items based on their impact severity and potential risks.
The backlog offers a comprehensive overview into tech debt items, helping teams to estimate the overall cost of the debt, both in short and long-term and allocate the payoff as required. It’s vital to incorporate it into planning the project timelines: refactoring, bug fixing, code cleanup and appropriate resource allocation should all be part of the daily project management.
Maintaining a technical debt management backlog also helps to reduce the payoff costs. Just like financial debt increases over time, technical debt increases too: the more outdated, the greater costs will be incurred on the payoff. It’s thus critical that businesses pay an active role in assessing the backlog and prioritizing items to be paid off rather than leaving technical debt to be dealt with by the development team on their own (they will always have other pressing priorities to address).
4. Automated testing
Implementing a robust automated testing strategy, including unit tests, integration tests, and regression tests will help you manage technical debt effectively. This is hugely important when building applications that you intend to scale or that might see a lot of modifications or additions in the future. Companies often skip this practice because it may incur significant costs at the outset. However, in the long run they simplify the product development process and make it easier and more efficient.
Automated testing allows you to automatically detect issues should they occur while we implement new functionality or introduce any modifications to the existing application. Without automated testing you risk working with undetected bugs. To avoid them, you’d have to rely on manual testing which will consume a lot of the product budget and the development time. Automated testing is a very effective mechanism that checks whether we haven’t broken the existing components of an app as we are introducing new ones. Above all, technical debt management without automated testing may incur even more technical debt.
5. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
CI/CD practices are crucial for reducing technical debt because they enable early issue detection, faster feedback loops, code quality enforcement and iterative development. Above all, CI/CD emphasizes frequent and automated integration, testing, and deployment of code changes. Incorporate CI/CD into the development process to establish a robust framework for addressing technical debt proactively - it will help you ensure higher code quality, faster delivery, and more efficient development practices.
6. Documentation
Maintaining up-to-date documentation is an extremely important part of the entire development process and a powerful communication mechanism for all stakeholders. It’s best to start the documentation before even before the development works begin.
Maintaining accurate and up-to-date documentation that describes the architecture, design decisions, and implementation details will help navigate the project team through the development process and ensure adherence to agreed-upon standards and solutions. Thorough documentation helps to eliminate guesswork and misunderstandings.
Without up-to-date documentation developers risk creating solutions that aren’t fully aligned with the project requirements, which may eventually lead to technical debt. Similarly when product requirements change and technical debt is discovered, the documentation should be updated as soon as possible.
7. Open communication
It’s critical that all developers are on the same page when it comes to programming at every stage of the product development process. We have witnessed situations in which several team members engaged in side communication to make critical coding decisions.
Whether this happens out of anxiety to communicate publicly or a simple lack of awareness of the importance of open communication, it has to be eliminated at all cost. If team members aren’t on the same page with regards to the programming process, they may create technical debt.
To avoid such situations, making sure the organizational culture emphasizes the importance of open, non-violent communication and trains employees in giving constructive feedback. It’s the best way to build healthy communication practices. Team should also make use of preferred communication tools to help keep everyone updated.
8. Adopting design patterns and best practices
Design patterns provide well-established templates and guidelines for structuring code and designing software architecture. They promote maintainability, scalability, and code reusability, greatly contributing to better technical debt management.
Following these established guidelines allows development teams to communicate more effectively, mitigate the risks associated with technical debt and deliver more robust and sustainable digital solutions. They also offer guidance for teams during incremental refactoring.
9. Monitoring and metrics
Implementing monitoring and logging mechanisms is crucial for obtaining insights into the performance, stability, and usage patterns of your application. Metrics e.g. for code complexity, coverage, bug tracking, duplication or technical debt ratio will help you gain awareness of the state of the technical debt – its impact, scope and severity.
Moreover, implementing metrics will allow you to assess the risks associated with specific technical debt items. They allow you to identify areas of the system that require immediate attention based on the severity of the debt, as well as its impact on performance and user experience. They can be vital in finding the balance between the need for new features and the necessity to pay down debt.
As such, metrics are necessary to facilitate communication and informed decision-making between stakeholders as to prioritizing items for refactoring, allocating resources or developing new features. They allow for enhanced collaboration on addressing the most critical debt items, allowing teams to proactively approach these tasks.
10. Continual learning and skill development
Since technical debt can be a result of insufficient knowledge or lack of experience of the development team, it’s important to ensure continual learning of your staff so that they keep up with evolving technologies and continually deepen their understanding of modern software development practices. It’s vital to boosting their problem-solving skills and increasing their ability to adapt to changing project requirements.
At RST, we build a culture of encouraging continual learning within our team through knowledge sharing, collaboration and individual development. The HR department plays an active role in the process; we also support the development of our developers by sustaining active tech communities, creating diverse opportunities for hard skill development and streamlining their growth paths. Investing in learning about technical debt ensures our team understands it better and knows that mitigating it is a continual effort and a shared responsibility of the entire team.
Managing technical debt with RST Software
If you have any questions related to how we can help you minimize your technical debt and future-proof your solutions against potential debt, just drop us a line via this quick contact form and we'll get back to you in 24 hours.
