It is unwise to write a bad code knowingly as it might provide some profit at the initial stages, but in the long run it may even result in premature death of the company. Therefore implementing user stories is essential when you want to refactor and address tech debt in your codebase. When you review the code you can prevent intentional tech debt accumulation and formation. This way you can find out early ways to address tech debt as well. Therefore, add a review column in the task board so that you can confidently say that the code is free from tech debt and will function as desired.
Done And Ready
Change the definition of ‘Done’ and ‘Ready’. This will help you not only to avoid tech debt accumulation but also help in reduction as and when it is detected. You can implement useful elements like code coverage and regular code review as some better and disciplined practice. All these can be implemented at the story level which is needed to avoid and address technical debt. This will prevent accumulation of tech debt as well. You must know that when tech debt grows the impact is even more severe and therefore you should try to have larger code bases with no or minimum tech debt.
Pair Or Mob Programming
When you have clear definition ready for the new stories it will help the development team to build codes which will provide the desired and proper value. This can be effectively done when you implement the practice of pair or mob programming. This will help in sharing better, brighter and newer insights about good and bad code design, its effects on the code, promote and learn effective ways of identifying, refactoring and fixing problems. All this will result in better understanding and cooperation among teams to produce error free codes.
Rule For The Boy Scout
When you implement the Boy Scout rule in code design and maintenance, you can be sure that whenever a code is designed and made ready for release it is clean. Such rule will also ensure that you get the maximum return for such rework and reduction of tech debt by focusing on the improvement of only those codes that requires it the most. Each line of the code is considered when tech debt is addressed and therefore, care and proper focus is required during refactoring. You can come to more about refactoring when you click here.
Proper Coding Standards
When you follow and practice proper coding standards, it will not only ensure prevention as well as reduction of tech debt, but will also make tech debt visible to the teams. Teams should be accountable for tech debt, agree together on methods of control, and share feedback among themselves so that quality of the code is never compromised. Using tools for automated test running, static code analysis, and others will help teams to take proper and effective decisions for addressing tech debt. It is prudent to have apragmatic working atmosphere and agreement that is doable and also evolves in the future.