How to Reduce Technical Debt of a Software Development Project?

Accumulating technical debt is a common occurrence in many software development projects. In fact, it’s almost inevitable due to various factors that arise throughout the development lifecycle. Reducing technical debt is crucial for maintaining code quality, improving maintainability and ensuring long-term project success. In this article, with Bocasay, our offshore IT agency, we discuss key strategies that can help you effectively manage and reduce the technical debt of your software development project. 

In software development, technical debt refers to the long-term costs and challenges that arise from quick fixes, suboptimal code, or shortcuts taken during the development process. 

Much like financial debt, technical debt incurs “interest” over time, as these quick solutions may lead to more complex problems, higher maintenance costs and reduced agility in future development efforts.

While technical debt can sometimes be a strategic choice to meet short-term goals or deadlines, failing to manage it effectively can lead to significant issues, including decreased code quality, slower development cycles and increased risk of project failure.

This is precisely why understanding and addressing technical debt is crucial for maintaining a sustainable and scalable codebase, and ultimately ensuring that software can evolve efficiently to meet changing requirements.

Key Strategies for Technical Debt Reduction in Software Development

⬛ Identify and Prioritize Technical Debt

○ Code Reviews and Audits: Regularly conduct code reviews and audits to identify areas with technical debt. You can benefit from tools like static code analyzers that can help detect issues such as code smells, complex code and violations of coding standards.

○ Prioritization: Not all technical debt needs to be addressed immediately. Categorize and prioritize debt based on factors like its impact on performance, security, maintainability and how often the affected code is touched.

⬛ Refactoring

○ Incremental Refactoring: Instead of attempting to refactor the entire codebase at once, you should incorporate small, incremental refactoring efforts into the regular development process. This can be done by improving code quality whenever you work on a particular module or feature.

○ Boy Scout Rule: You should encourage your development team to follow the “Boy Scout Rule”. This basically means leaving the code cleaner than they first found it. Always remember that even small improvements add up over time.

⬛ Integrate Debt Reduction into Sprints

○ Allocate Time for Debt Reduction: Dedicate a portion of each sprint specifically for addressing technical debt. This could be in the form of a “technical debt” user story, or a task that teams work on alongside new feature development.

○ Balance New Features and Debt Reduction: Take care to balance the development of new features with the reduction of technical debt. This will prevent debt from accumulating while ensuring continued progress on the project.

⬛ Improve Documentation

○ Update Documentation: Ensure that all project documentation, including API documentation, design documents and inline comments, is up-to-date. Clear documentation reduces the risk of misunderstandings and future debt accumulation.

○ Code Comments: Encourage developers to write meaningful comments that explain in detail why certain decisions were made, not just what the code does. This ultimately helps future developers to understand the rationale behind the code.

⬛ Adopt Automated Testing

○ Unit Tests: Write and maintain unit tests in order to catch issues early and ensure that changes or refactoring do not introduce new bugs. A strong suite of tests provides the confidence needed to make changes to the codebase.

○ Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): You should implement CI/CD pipelines in order to automate testing and ensure that code changes do not introduce regressions. Automated tests can act as a safety net during refactoring.

⬛ Set Coding Standards

○ Establish Coding Guidelines: Define and enforce coding standards across the team to ensure consistency and prevent the introduction of poor-quality code that contributes to technical debt.

○ Code Reviews: Make code reviews a mandatory part of the development process. Peer reviews help catch issues early and ensure an accurate adherence to coding standards.

⬛ Involve the Whole Team

○ Shared Responsibility: Make technical debt a team responsibility, not just something for a few senior developers to manage. Educate the entire team about the importance of reducing technical debt and how their daily practices can potentially contribute to it.

○ Culture of Quality: Foster a culture where quality is prioritized and cutting corners is discouraged. This culture shift can reduce the initial creation of technical debt.

⬛ Regularly Revisit and Revise

○ Retrospectives: Use sprint retrospectives to discuss technical debt. Identify areas of improvement and track progress in reducing debt over time.

○ Debt Tracking: Maintain a technical debt backlog that lists identified debts along with their priority. Regularly revisit this backlog and incorporate items into the sprint planning process.

⬛Avoid Accumulating New Debt

○ Disciplined Development: Resist the temptation to take shortcuts for the sake of quick delivery. Implement disciplined development practices to avoid accumulating new technical debt.

○ Proper Planning: Ensure that projects are properly planned and scoped, with realistic timelines that do not force developers to take shortcuts that lead to technical debt.

⬛ Leverage Modern Tools and Frameworks

○ Use Modern Frameworks and Libraries: Regularly update, and whenever necessary, migrate to more modern frameworks and libraries that can offer better performance, security and maintainability.

○ Tooling: Invest in tools that help automate code quality checks, dependency management and other tasks that can accumulate debt if not managed properly.

The Bottom Line

Reducing technical debt is an ongoing process that requires commitment from the entire development team. While always trying to prevent new debt from accumulating, by identifying, prioritizing and systematically addressing technical debt, you can essentially maintain a healthier codebase and ensure the long-term success of your software project.

Do you need a partner capable of producing high quality IT development for your company? At Bocasay, our dedicated teams of developers provide cutting edge software solutions for companies around the world. Get in touch to find out how we can help with your next project.