Effective Strategies to Reduce Technical Debt and Boost Code Quality

Technical debt is a metaphor used in software development to describe the hidden costs and potential risks of cutting corners instead of implementing an optimal and well-thought-out solution. It builds up due to several causes, either because the code is implemented in haste or because there is a lack of or insufficient testing due to deadlines, poor documentation, and resource limitation, among other reasons.

Building up technical debt over a long period negatively impacts code quality, project timelines, and maintenance costs. Therefore, it’s important to actively manage technical debt and keep it within acceptable limits to ensure long-term project success.

Sometimes known as code debt, it is the future costs that a project team will have to bear to refactor and improve code. It mostly resulted from prioritizing quick delivery over writing high-quality code.

Common causes of technical debt

• Rushed development: Delivery pressure could lead to the development team cutting corners to meet deadlines.
• Unclear requirements: Lack of clear requirements or ever-changing requirements can lead to less-than-optimal code that needs refactoring.
• Skimping on testing and code reviews: Insufficient or lack of developer testing and code reviews could potentially introduce defects and bad practices.
• Legacy code and technology: Building on outdated code and technology generally increases complexity and maintenance costs.
• Developer skill: Developers who lack specialized knowledge or are inexperienced could write inefficient code or cause architectural issues.

Why is it important to reduce technical debt?

Technical debt accumulation is normal for a development team. Effectively managing technical debt is important, and the team should understand the consequences of not paying off this debt.

The following are reasons as to why reducing technical debt is important.

Improved code quality and maintainability

Addressing technical debt means the team can remove dead code and optimize and refactor as needed. Another benefit of refactoring is that it will make the code easier to understand, improving the onboarding time for new developers.

Ability to deliver faster

If a codebase is riddled with technical debt, developers will have to spend more time troubleshooting or working around legacy issues, which will slow down new feature development. Reducing debt will minimize rework and improve developer productivity.

Reduced the risk of bugs

Codebases with unaddressed technical debt generally have more bugs, possibly leading to system failures. Addressing technical debt will help reduce bugs and improve system reliability.

Increased developer satisfaction

Developers can get tired and frustrated working on codebases with high technical debt. Reducing debt makes for a better development environment and improves developer satisfaction.

1. Define coding standards and best practices.
   • Document and enforce coding standards: Ensure there is a well-documented coding standard and all developers are familiar with its nuances. This would prevent technical debt as a result of inconsistent code quality.
   • Code quality checks: Perform code quality checks before the code is deployed. This can be done using static code analysis tools like SonarCube, Resharper, and Codeacy. This type of analysis can be done either on the developer’s machine or during the pull request review phase before integration.
2. Technical debt visibility in the backlog.
   • Track technical debt as product backlog items so they can be prioritized for development.
   • Ensure that the cost of individual debt items is quantified so they can be prioritized based on a cost-benefit analysis and implemented along with the usual feature development tasks.
3. Document architecture and track decisions.
   • Ensure artifacts like architecture, coding conventions, and best practices are documented and kept up to date.
   • A decision log of important technical decisions should also be maintained.
4. Monitor and measure technical debt.
   • Tools like SonarCube could provide metrics on code quality and technical debt, which could be tracked over time.
   • The team can set goals for reducing technical debt items like improving code coverage or reducing code smells.
5. Promote refactoring on the fly.
   • Encourage refactoring during feature development or bug fixes rather than simply working around sub-optimal code. However, a balance must be achieved between the actual development task and refactoring. Suppose the development estimate for a particular task is 1 hour, and the estimate for clearing a technical debt item is 6 hours and involves complex testing. Then, it would make more sense to complete the development task and defer the technical debt item. However, it’s important to keep track of the deferred technical debt for future prioritization.
   • Utilize patterns like Strangler Fig when dealing with legacy code that is part of technical debt, such that it can be phased out seamlessly.
6. Discourage quick fixes and workarounds.
   • Quick fixes and workarounds should not be encouraged; instead, spend time investigating and getting to the bottom of the issue. Incorporating root cause analysis (RCA) for bugs will aid in this effort.
   • Deadlines need to be prioritized, but the team should be able to strike a balance between short-term delivery and long-term quality to avoid compounding technical debt.

Good technical debt management aims to sustain code quality, reduce maintenance costs, and enable the development team to respond flexibly to new requirements. Here are the best practices for handling technical debt:

1. Identify and prioritize debt.
   • Assess: Leverage tools to measure code quality to gather information on parts of the codebase that are debt candidates. This should ideally be performed at regular intervals.
   • Categorize: Each technical debt item should be categorized in a meaningful way, such as legacy code, unsupported dependencies, complex code, or complex design.
   • Prioritize: Technical debt items should be prioritized based on factors like business value, performance, and maintainability. Debt that is part of the critical path of the system should be prioritized.
2. Implement a process for managing debt.
   • Debt severity: Technical debt items should contain severity levels, like high-priority or fix-later. This would help avoid subjective decision-making.
   • Part of the backlog: Technical debt items need to live as product backlog items in the backlog. They could be created with appropriate labels identifying them as debt. Their presence in the backlog ensures that they will be addressed and not forgotten.
3. Strike a healthy balance between new feature development and debt repayment.
   • Technical debt items as part of the sprint: Set aside 10-20% of development time within a sprint to pay off debt. Realistically, this would not be possible in every single sprint, but it would be beneficial to pay off debt every few sprints.
   • Incremental debt payment: There could be technical debt items that realistically could not be completed in a sprint. In such cases, dividing the debt into smaller chunks that could be worked on during a sprint would be ideal instead of having a complete sprint or dedicated time box to complete the debt payment as a whole.
4. Adopt test-driven development (TDD) and embrace automated testing.
   • Improve test coverage: Add unit and integration tests for code. This can be easily done for existing code but could be time-consuming for existing code. However, the initial cost will be well worth the effort as having a good test coverage will increase confidence when refactoring and reduce the risk of introducing bugs.
   • Testing as part of the pipeline: Integrate automated tests into the CI/CD pipelines. For example, when a pull request is created, unit and integration tests could be executed along with code quality checks.
5. Encourage collaboration and foster a quality-focused culture.
   • Perform code reviews: Encourage team members to perform detailed code reviews to avoid the accumulation of debt. These reviews should serve as a learning platform, particularly for developers who are new to the team.
   • Promote code ownership: Encourage feature ownership among developers, empowering them to refactor when needed.
   • Celebrate milestones: Recognize the team’s effort when debt is reduced. This helps instill the importance of code quality.
6. Stakeholder involvement.
   • Buy into the concept by nontechnical stakeholders: It is very important that nontechnical stakeholders understand what technical debt is and how long-term its impact is on the quality of the end product for which they are able to actively work.
   • Be realistic with stakeholders: Not all the technical debt items paid off will have a tangible impression on the end product but will add up in terms of value in the long term. Besides, technical debt is not a one-time thing; instead, it will be ongoing. It’s an important fact that must be clearly understood.
   • Review debt status regularly with stakeholders: Sharing examples of technical debt items paid off that helped prevent issues and sharing metrics of improvements that could be attributed to debt items paid off will help show how debt management contributes to the long-term quality of the end product.
7. Document technical debt and share findings.
   • Documentation of debt items: Each item of technical debt needs to be appropriately documented along with its cost and the plans to resolve it. This documentation should also be linked to the product backlog item residing in the backlog.
   • Encourage knowledge sharing: Regular development team meetings focused on debt management help educate developers on approaches for dealing with technical debt.

Managing technical debt and reducing it is important for maintaining a healthy codebase and keeping development sustainable. Following are some of the essential tools and strategies that might assist:

1. Static code analysis tools
   • SonarQube/SonarCloud: Provides metrics on code quality regarding maintainability, reliability, and security. It flags issues such as code duplication, complexity, and potential bugs.
   • ReSharper-for .NET, Linting Tools-for JavaScript, Python, etc.: These will help locate code smells, unnecessary code, and performance issues right in the IDE.
   • CodeClimate: Provides information about code quality, test coverage, and maintainability in a number of languages.
2. Automated code review tools
   • GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD: Automate code quality checks and standards; use pull request reviews for this purpose.
   • Codacy: Run automated code reviews, flag issues in pull requests, and work well with popular version control systems.
   • Reviewable and Crucible: Take some pain out of code review by making it easy to track reviews and comments and find unresolved issues that are accumulating technical debt.
3. Refactoring tools
   • IntelliJ IDEA Refactoring Tools (or similar features in VS Code and Visual Studio): These tools will help developers refactor safely and identify points at which their code needs simplification or modularization.
   • SonarLint: Provides real-time feedback on code quality to help developers solve issues before adding them to the code base.
4. Dependency management tools
   • Dependabot: Finds outdated or vulnerable dependencies in GitHub repositories. Reduce security debt by requesting automated dependency updates.
   • Snyk: Finds vulnerabilities in dependencies and integrates with CI/CD so that only secure and up-to-date dependencies are ever deployed.
5. Architecture and design analysis tools
   • Structure101 and NDepend (.NET): These are tools that perform analyses based on dependencies, complexity, and layering to estimate architectural debt and find the parts of the system in need of redesign.
   • SonarGraph: Visualizes code dependencies and allows the control of the architectural constraints of an application.
6. Documentation and knowledge sharing
   • Confluence: Centralizes documentation knowledge for sharing priorities about tech debt, architectural decisions, and known areas needing improvement.
   • Draw.io, Diagrams.net, or Lucid: Handy in creating and maintaining architectural diagrams illustrating areas with complex dependencies or code tangles.
7. Issue and debt tracking
   • JIRA: Allows tracking tech debt by labeling specific issues as “tech debt” and setting priorities that can be scheduled for refactoring sprints.
   • Azure DevOps: Allows tracking technical debt items in the backlog, providing visibility into debt next to new features and bug fixes.
   • CodeScene: Provides insight into hotspots, or in other words, files with frequent changes combined with high complexity, to allow for prioritizing tech debt in areas likely to make the biggest difference in the code base.
8. Testing and continuous integration tools
   • JUnit – Java, xUnit – .Net, Jest – JavaScript: These testing frameworks provide confidence in code quality by making sure adequate test coverage is implemented.
   • Automated testing and continuous integration pipelines using Azure DevOps Pipelines or Jenkins would help avoid debt by catching bugs before changes go into production and enforcing quality gates.
9. Data-driven analysis and monitoring
   • New Relic or Dynatrace: Know application performance metrics, which are bottlenecks that lead to inefficiencies that create conditions for performance-related technical debt.
   • Application Insights on Azure: Provides a view of the code paths being taken, error rates, and system health, pointing out where tech debt is impacting production stability.

The advantages of managing technical debt are that it greatly helps in immediate and long-term health in many ways, which are listed below:

• Improved code quality: Actively managing technical debt keeps the code clean, well-organized, and maintainable; hence, adding new features or addressing the issues can be done easily without introducing bugs.
• Increased project longevity: The project is much more robust; it will adapt and survive, changing continuously to meet changing requirements or technologies. The more technical debt a project has, the less tolerant it will be of necessary updates.
• Long-term development time reduction: Regular clearing of technical debt can prevent issues from building up that would otherwise make future development slower and costlier.
• Increased team efficiency and morale: The more maintainable the code, the less time is spent wading through convoluted structures, and hence, more creative parts of problem-solving can be done. This should affect productivity positively as well as job satisfaction.
• Lower maintenance costs: Usually, high technical debt brings in bugs and performance issues that are costly to deal with, but keeping debt under control keeps maintenance costs lower and more predictable.

Encourage the team to embed technical debt reduction into regular workflows: allocate time in each sprint or release for debt assessment and refactoring.

Developing a culture of understanding that managing technical debt is an ongoing process, not a one-time activity, will keep the codebase healthy and the project truly sustainable.