Anticipate technical debt
First, it is important to know what level of technical debt you expect. For this, you have to ask yourself if you are developing a POC, a V1 or a “final” product. It should be understood that a POC will have a higher technical debt. The objective is to develop a project quickly, which meets the need, and with the lowest possible cost. It will be used to test the market and will either be thrown in the trash for a V1, or largely reviewed. So it is not necessary to be too demanding on code quality, for example.
Regarding a V1 or an MVP, you should know that he may be required to serve more than one year. So you should not allow yourself too much freedom. However, you have to know how to make decisions that will lead to having technical debt. If these decisions have an impact on the business, for example. The whole thing is that these are decisions made consciously. You can get in touch with Best Debt Advice In London
A final product on the other hand, tends to be used by a large number of users. As part of an advanced company that is often no longer in its Start Up phase. It is therefore essential to limit the technical debt of the main functionalities. By having a test process. By optimizing the code by writing documentation that is kept up to date. Above all by migrating the code to new technologies when necessary.
Choose your technologies
How to choose technologies that limit technical debt?
You should know that some technologies bring a debt from the beginning of the project. This is the case of technologies that have a short lifespan. For example, it will be necessary to quickly migrate to other technologies. To avoid these problems, it is preferable to choose frameworks or libraries that have a large community. That are supported and used by large companies that are strongly linked to them. In this way, the company will contribute resources to maintain it. You can take the services of Best Debt Advice In London.
To limit the technical debt brought by the technologies. It is also necessary to choose those with a good “developer experience”. In my opinion, the developer experience makes it possible to increase the lifespan of a technology. Which is then widely used by the community, but also to increase the quality of developments by simplifying them.
To answer the original “how to choose” question. I would say make sure people choosing a tool have experience with it. and have compared it to similar tools. You won’t be able to tell if a wood-handled screwdriver is better than a plastic-handled screwdriver without testing both for a while. The reasoning is the same for technologies and development tools.
My third tip is simple but not obvious to everyone. If people with little experience are working on a project, it is necessary to ensure that their work is supervised. They may be interns, work-study trainees, junior developers or even experienced newcomers who do not know the company’s processes.
Code quality
I won’t dwell on this point, but reducing technical debt (as a developer) necessarily requires knowing and applying some principles of code quality:
- Readability: The code must be readable to be reread and understood easily, by other developers or for oneself even a few weeks after its writing.
- Maintainability: The code must be maintainable, that is to say, it must not be necessary to rewrite it to make small changes.
- Simplicity: The simpler a code, the more readable and maintainable it is.
- Factorized: This is the fact of sharing code between different parts of the application, so that it can be reused, increase its maintainability and improve its readability.
- Do not reinvent the wheel: Reinventing the wheel means developing logic that already exists elsewhere, which leads to bugs, wasted time and an increase in the amount of code, making it less readable and more complicated to understand .
Finally, I still want to draw your attention to the fact that my advice is mainly about reducing technical debt . However, the best advice I can give is that having no technical debt at all is dangerous. This would mean that you are doing a high-quality project, which therefore requires a large budget to allocate to it. You can take the services of Best Debt Advice In London. If your business doesn’t have this budget, try stepping back to make sure you’re not sabotaging your project.
