Naturally, that’s the best approach to do so, since the most efficient way to manage technical debt implies a group effort led by a well-defined plan. Yet, that method leaves a gap that we haven’t explored before: Is there something individual developers can do to help with technical debt? Fortunately, there is.
What Is Technical Debt?
Before getting into the ways in which any country wise email marketing list software engineer can help with technical debt, I think it’s important to define what technical debt actually means. We use that term to refer to the process through which a development team chooses a particular development route over another to satisfy pressing needs or to meet specific goals. In a sense, technical debt is the act of compromising when coding.
Thus, an engineer might choose to write a function in a certain way that allows for the software to execute that function right away, but, by doing so, they are blocking a further sophistication of that functionality.
Technical debt can occur in 3 main areas:
- Application (the software)
- Infrastructure (operating systems and environments)
- Architecture (hardware)
The reasons why a development team might be willing to incur technical debt can differ. Most of the time, developers choose to sacrifice certain good coding practices to meet a delivery deadline. That mostly happens when a development team is on a tight schedule where postponing the delivery to work on the function would translate into increased costs or an unacceptable time to market.
1. Make the Debt Visible
There’s a nasty habit in certain development can ai reduce inequities? teams that has engineers tiptoeing their way around their code issues. Everyone knows that the issues are there and everyone is impacted by them, but everyone keeps moving forward while looking the other way. Unfortunately, doing that only increases the interest the team has to pay for that debt.
2. Refactor Code When Implementing New Features
A developer reading this might think that refactoring code while working on a new feature is a terrible idea. But hear me out: Doing that can increase the application’s stability while also preventing new interests from ever emerging.
For example, a team working on vietnam data a new web app might devote part of their time to squashing certain bugs. As they flesh out the web app, more and more bugs appear on top of the older bugs. After a while, the team will be forced to stop development of new features to focus on refactoring the code to get it to function properly. That can significantly derail a development project (not to mention the added costs associated with the delays).