You might have explored what the idea of technical debt is. You have understood what the idea behind technical debt is and how it takes place. Now, it is really important for you to know the type of technical debts you are looking for, and then you can find the solutions available with the lot. Depending on the type of technical debt, there will be a difference in the solution for sure and you have to work out on that as well.
Time to head towards the types first for better understanding:
You have to explore what technical debt is and that is for measuring the technical debt accurately. What you actually don’t know is that the estimation of the noted technical debt solely depends on the nature. So, going to understand more about the common types first will help you address the situation a lot better than before. Try getting to learn more about that from on time.
- Lack of documentation: Documentation happens to be a major part of the software development based best practices. The software is mostly driven for the evolvement. It is always vital that the written code is always understood at all the time and by everyone who might get involved in the current development procedure.
- Code based complexity: Complexity can always be stated and measured in multiple ways. However, it can be measured to be dependent and path length for performing any operation. Longer path can often lead to some complex codes in the end.
- Lack in modularity: This stage will generally result from the poorer version of the designs. Some of these codes will sometime end up serving different logics. The more codes these developers are willing to work on the more lack will be in modularity and that can get bottle neck. It is always harder for you to manage software with logics all over codes and having parts of codes handling various logics, at the same time.
- Lower form of test coverage: Test coverage always seems to be the major possibility associated with code quality, mainly when you are trying to use the agile methods for supporting the development procedure. Tests will ensure that every part of the said code is behaving in the way it was intended to be. A lower form of level of the test coverage will easily end up reducing the certainty of the current accuracy of the behavior of the software. It might make it quite difficult to just solve issues whenever they are occurring.
- Source based code formatting: This is one very common section, but fortunately, noted to be the easiest one to get properly fixed. Using the proper tool and template during and even better before starting with the development procedure can reduce that form of technical debt in a dramatic manner.
So, you have learned a lot more about the types of the technical debts. Now, the main concern is to be associated with the ways things are going to be estimated into.
Estimation of the technical debt:
Now that you have worked on the technical debt by understanding what it actually is and the types as followed, it is time to find that perfect approach for measuring the technical debt you are in. In no way it might be calculated manually as doing that might require going into proper code and then detecting all issues inside and after that estimating possible issue one after another. This process is not just time consuming to get proceeded in that way but can prove to be impossible to estimate evolving codes. At this right point, whenever measuring technical debt, remember that the code will be in a different state.
- One major way to perform this task is by working on the static analysis of the code using tools for supporting the same. There are some notable tools used in this regard and those are SonarQube, Coverity, Closure Compiler and Checkstyle.
- There are mainly two ways by which you can measure technical debt. One is to get the ratio associated with the technical debt as per the code volume and second one is by using directly the estimates as given by tools with lists of technical debts and references of the code.
- Tools like SonarQube will provide you with an estimate in the hours or days needed for fixing the issue. For the current ratio approach, the reliable experts will use the initial estimates or might even better, the entire time needed for developing software so far an extrapolate value as per the technical debt ratio.
- The time used for development is quite accurate. Therefore, measuring the technical debt from the ratio can provide you with the accuracy in estimation of the work used for fixing the issues in question.
Measuring the debt will provide you with the time used for fixing the debt. Fixing these debts might cost you money and it might take added manual days from development team for fixing the same. Leaving these technical debts inside code is not going to be an option as technical debts if left in an uncorrected manner can lead to some more debts, making the future debts rather difficult than before. Even though this attempt is here to reduce the technical debts and that might be costly, but still keeping them on the waiting list and not addressing those at their earlier stages can end you up costing even more money in the near future. Offshore software development company
Get to reduce the debt:
Being agile is always the best way for you to manage the technical debt and then reducing it whenever the right time appears. The sooner you get the option to address the issue, the less interest you might end up paying with passing time. For addressing the technical debt, the software development teams can always use the quickest ways to solve the issues. Make sure to prioritize the problems first and then start working on the said rate for sure.
Leave a Reply