When you come to now of the existence of tech debt in your code, it is time to address it without any further delay to keep it functional and also keep your business running. There are some easy and effective ways to repay the tech debts with interest. Your prime objective is to keep tech debts to the minimum and prevent any further accumulation, and that can easily be done by maintaining a strategic and planned development process. You have to ensure that quality of the code developed is perfect right from the word go and all measures have been taken to keep the code clean. This first-time- right work culture would ensure that there is no accumulation of tech debt in the long run.
Test Driven Development
The entire developmental process should be test driven to ensure clean code with proper coding design and pattern is produced with standard coding practices. This would ensure an increase in code readability and easy maintenance application. Such test driven development can be done for all test scenarios and must be executed after each enhancement to the business logic. You may also use automated process during functional testing which would significantly reduce the cost of any manual regression and also reduce the existence of any unidentified defects in the code. It is advantageous if you maintain a library of reusable codes within your business unit which are tested previously and can be used as off the shelf pluggable component.
Testing And Tracking
If you ensure one hundred percent foolproof testing coverage across all products, you can be sure that your code is free from any defect under positive and negative test scenarios. Use automated testing and continuous integration to test user interface which would also save the cost of manual testing. All the defects during and after setup application should be tracked by a defect tracking tool and reported immediately so that steps to resolve those defects can be taken at the earliest.
Proper Process Followed
Following a planned process like independent and compulsory code review, documentation of all the projects along with all the details and specifications, mandatory learning and training programs can also help you a lot. When you have a plan ready to resolve any problem, you can minimize it easily, and therefore you must also have enough budgets approved by the senior management for the purpose. You can also communicate about the existence of the tech debt and about your plans to tackle it to your stakeholders minimizing assumptions and tech debt as well as minimize any frequently occurring collective unproductive events among your team.
Use Of Proper Tools And Design
To keep your debt in check, you must use proper tools to make the process faster and more effective. There are several software and tools available to test, budget, estimate tech debt that also helps in designing, development, and tracking. If you use layered architecture while designing, strong domain models and planning consensus would also help in debt minimization. Just like you have ways such as credit card consolidation loan to pay off your financial debt, tech debt also has several tools to get rid of it easily.
