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At our project we're trying to keep technical debt on the feature side. That is: we're doing stories as good as possible technically including required refacto

At our project we're trying to keep technical debt on the feature side. That is: we're doing stories as good as possible technically including required refactoring. We're keeping this manageable by reducing the feature set or intentionally not implementing certain special cases (which reflect the technical debt), of course only in discussion with the project owner. By doing this we keep the complexity within bounds. When we are catching up on this kind of debt it means we have to implement those omitted special cases, which has the benefit of being completely transparent to the product owner as well as to the developers. This may then involve to refactor entire subsystems, but until now this was never a problem (since the business value was always measurable). Coding-level technical debt we're keeping track of using Sonarqube, and by keeping all metrics on zero (either by fixing or by intentionally supressing). This works quite well for us. We're benefitting from being a greenfield project (a SaaS solution based on Spring Boot).

rcshubhadeep 8y ago
So, basically, better spec, not changing spec once defined and tracking, and static code analysis are the bottomline of what you are implementing. Am I right? Do you find that having some kind of intelligent agent based analysis on PR and spec is going to help you?
- chupa-chups 8y ago
  No, i don't think so at this time. Previously i worked on a on-premise HR solution which had lots of problems with technical debt. I think even in this case it wouldn't have helped to have some kind of tool, since the problem was not really to know what to do but "how" to do it. We approached the problem by extracting domain-isolated "microservices" (i.e. separate modules). This worked quite well, but had the usual drawback of being "only" technical, not helping the users in any way. Bad from the POV of a manager :-)

rcshubhadeep 8y ago

So, basically, better spec, not changing spec once defined and tracking, and static code analysis are the bottomline of what you are implementing. Am I right? Do you find that having some kind of intelligent agent based analysis on PR and spec is going to help you?

chupa-chups 8y ago
No, i don't think so at this time. Previously i worked on a on-premise HR solution which had lots of problems with technical debt. I think even in this case it wouldn't have helped to have some kind of tool, since the problem was not really to know what to do but "how" to do it. We approached the problem by extracting domain-isolated "microservices" (i.e. separate modules). This worked quite well, but had the usual drawback of being "only" technical, not helping the users in any way. Bad from the POV of a manager :-)