Technical debt is one of the biggest problems for legacy projects. When you have excessive technical debt in a project then the velocity of the project code takes the hit. There are so much work that goes into a legacy project to keep it running and functional at all times. This is known as the servicing of debt. With so much work to do you may find little time to look after tech debt formation, accumulation and management. However, it is important to pay off tech debt just like any other financial debt. If you do not then slowly but surely your project along with your company will have a premature death.
Provide Some Slack Time
It is very important that you provide some slack time for the developers so that they can work on the projects and stop the ‘bleeding’. It is imperative that new capabilities are added to the system continuously so that you can stay ahead in the competition. Therefore, you should concentrate on finding ways in which tech debt can be prevented and controlled. You can use test driven processes for development and other methods of continuous integration in the project codes, but it is best that you provide some slack time between each iteration. This will help in finding the bugs, if any and also find the necessary ways to fix it.
Servicing Technical Debt
Servicing technical debt is important and with the help of continuous integration and automated test results, it can be done effectively. Though it may be so that the end result is not so clear initially but in the long run, you will come to see the benefit of it. You will be able to see the improvement in the code quality as well as the productivity over a period of time. But then it is the same principle with any financial debt as well. If you can give time there then you should you neglect tech debt? When you payback any debt with interest, results are bound to follow.
Attitudes Toward Technical Debt
Different companies and project owners have different attitudes toward technical debt with varying logic and philosophies as well. Some think that tech debt is useful for a company, even to some extent, and others think that it should be refactored as soon as it is detected. Some avoid repaying it entirely and take on tech debt until a code becomes useless. For a good project, it is required to rack the velocity and tech debt and also to find ways of reducing it until the desired velocity is recovered.
Measurement Of Debt
Though it is true that tech debt cannot be measured with any specific metrics, there are some network with which you can track tech debt. You can click here to know more about such tracking networks. Identifying and admittance is the most important factor for tech debt solution. It is only then you can prioritize the debt according and start repaying it with careful and timely refactoring to keep your legacy projects running.
