How to Reduce Technical Debt in Agile

As quoted by Jason fried, “what you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.”

When you act you make mistakes. No person hadn’t made mistakes; mistakes are like debt. that needs to be paid back with interest. Coming to software development is a similar case where technical debt also needs to be paid. When developers work using shortcuts or go for a different approach than the best ones they will create technical debt and need to be paid in one way or another.

Technical debt. in software is a concept where the cost of additional rework is implied that is caused by choosing an easy solution instead of using the best approach that would take them longer. Technical debt is a problem cannot be escaped. No agile can offer a silver bullet for the technical debt. As time passes learning to know about the problem by an agile team may select a different solution afterward, this can also be considered as a technical debt. The passively created solution for a problem or the up-gradation of the definition done by the team is also a technical debt.

Agile is mainly about speed. Proper functioning of application features is what continues the development. Even with the proper functioning of applications teams will accumulate some technical debt. within code, as a team will focus mainly on speed and faster delivery neglecting the assurance of quality and best practices.

To avoid this technical debt accumulation in a team, not only the scrum master or product owner but also the complete team needs to take responsibility for it which includes acceptance of using shortcuts to meet deadlines.

No team tries to create technical debt but they have to clear it. It is not possible to clear the technical debt completely because if tried to do so the project will never leave the development level. So it is wise to understand first how much the technical debt. Not knowing how much the technical debt can create more of it due to unawareness within a team so let’s, first of all, learn how to measure or monitor the technical debt.

Measuring Technical Debt

By measuring the technical debt agile teams can find the technical debt. ratio and further continue with application development. The tools like SonarQube and Coverity measure technical debt and also provide data to calculate technical debt ratio. By calculating it agile teams can manage their potential issues and manage their development.

Ways to Reduce Technical Debt

Going with automated testing is the most effective way of reducing technical debt. Using manual way for testing has many times proved inefficient due to more required time and human errors. While automated testing reduces code issues with debugging cycles and scans processes for code issues after every update of the module.

Correct structuring of a project can reduce the technical debt. By using a project management tool to track development status, and keep schedule this structuring can be done.

By making standards and best practices to follow by developers, by following them they can reduce technical debt considerably. In this practice pair programming is also a solution that can help.

With help of refactoring the internal quality of code without changing the external behavior is also a way to reduce technical debt. As refactoring is mainly for changing poorly written code and improving its quality it also helps in reducing the technical debt. Periodic refactoring will provide maintainability, readability, and efficiency of code.

If agile teams do not prefer to go with refactoring for reduction they can also opt for a scalable and flexible architecture. With new technology and architecture that is flexible, secure, and scalable teams can have seamless integration and feature addition.

 “Don’t let yourself off the hook with excuses.”- Jason Fried

Instead of giving excused and reasoning for the creation of technical debt, it is always better to improve and show consistency in actions to reduce them. Even though technical debts are seen mostly as a negative factor in agile but sometimes it can also provide a positive effect. For example, consists of application improvement in the development backlog instead of bug fixing. Technical debt is a reality of software development, it cannot be avoided entirely and only can be reduced and keeps it spiraling out of control. 

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