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CODEX
Technical Debt Management Best Practices in Software Engineering
Technical debt rate = lines of code that should be reworked / lines of existing source code * 100%
Technical debt exists on each project if it’s more than 1–3 months old. Having technical debt doesn’t necessarily mean that software engineers are not performing well. Technical debt can appear because of business pressure, lack of requirements, lack of interaction between team members etc. However, good software engineers know how to manage the technical debt and do that. Bad software engineers simply hide the tech debt from managers and customers, hoping that the project will be completed before it gets out of hand.
Managing technical debt is not difficult process at all, but it requires from at least lead software engineer to be disciplined and follow best practices described down below.
Technical debt register exists for the project
I believe that every software project has a backlog — a list of user stories that will be implemented in the upcoming sprints. The backlog size can range from a few stories to dozens of stories, depending on whether your product owner and business analysts work well or not. In addition to the user stories, backlog should include technical debt tickets.
Please look at the screen:
The first 3 tickets are user stories, the last one is technical debt item. Adding technical debt to the backlog ensures it will not be forgotten by the team.
If Business Analyst is responsible for creating user stories, then Technical Leader is responsible for creating tech debt tickets and keeping them up-to-date.
How to separate user story tickets from tech debt tickets in the backlog?
Each team member or stakeholder should be able to quickly determine if a ticket is a user story or tech debt, how many tech debt tickets exist, etc. There are several ways to do this:
