Top 4 Methods to Reduce Technical Debt
Right when embarking on a new software development project, you can reduce the likelihood of technical debt piling up and getting out of control.
In this article, we share a number of methods to practice on this. Especially, if you're already in the middle of a development project with growing technical debt, you can consider software consulting services to get your project back on track.
Generally speaking, there are three key factors of handling technical debt, as follow:
- Formulating a strategy to manage technical debt.
- Assess critical technical debt metrics.
- Adapting the development process to reduce technical debt
Let's consider each factor in detail to see how they can help achieve the goal of reducing technical debt.
How To Reduce Technical Debt?
Choose a flexible architecture
Choosing the right architecture in software development is critical. Today, development is all about flexibility and coping with evolving changes in the future. An architecture that needs refactoring and isn't robust enough to accommodate changes will likely to become an expensive type of technical debt in the future.
Having said that, at TP&P Technology - Leading Software Development Company in Vietnam, we employ a robust architecture with room for scalability requirements, leveraging microservice architecture / container-based architecture to expand without much difficulties at the start of an iteration for a release.
Frequent Code review
Based on observation from previous projects, implementing code review frequently can help significantly improve code quality and, as a result, reduces technical debt. Here, the objective assessment from other software developers provides constructive feedback for improvement. Yet, code review would only work if the process doesn't become a heavy, unnecessary burden for developers.
To make code review an effective endeavour, consider the following:
Pull request: Complex pull requests with complicated code changes make lives difficult for reviewers. Thus, encourage your team to breakdown large requests into smaller ones and add title and description for each one. This makes code review easier and more efficient.
Coding style and guideline: Having in place a coding guideline and preferred practice will provide your development team to have cleaner code and enable code review to be performed better since the coding format is now somewhat consistent across team.
Documenting changes
Recording changes in a repository can help team solve issues quickly. This is because once an issue occurs, the root change can be tracked back quickly. Documenting changes is particularly helpful in case of migrating to a new environment or transforming legacy software - where changes introduced too sudden can impact other parts of the system.
Prevent tech debt from happening
The methodologies listed above would work best if implemented into a project at the early stages. Once it’s going deep to later stages and your ongoing project already experienced heavy technical debt, it’s recommended that your team perform a thorough analysis on the sources of tech debt and develop a plan to gradually reduce it in the next iterations.
This can be done in-house or employ IT consulting services from external software outsourcing vendors to have quick access to technical experts, saving on time and costs.
