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Questions tagged [technical-debt]

Technical debt is a metaphor for the eventual consequences of poor software architecture and software development within a codebase.

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Project is nearly done, but procedural spaghetti code. Do I rewrite or just keep trying to ship it?

I'm a beginner web developer (one year of experience). A couple of weeks after graduating, I got offered a job to build a web application for a company whose owner is not much of a tech guy. He recruited me to avoid theft of his idea, the high cost…
solidsnake
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How to convince my boss that quality is a good thing to have in code?

My boss came to me today to ask me if we could implement a certain feature in 1.5 days. I had a look at it and told him that 2 to 3 days would be more realistic. He then asked me: "And what if we do it quick and dirty?" I asked him to explain what…
Kristof Claes
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How can I convince management to deal with technical debt?

This is a question that I often ask myself when working with developers. I've worked at four companies so far and I've become aware of a lack of attention to keeping code clean and dealing with technical debt that hinders future progress in a…
Desolate Planet
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Does craftsmanship pay off?

Possible Duplicates: Prototyping vs. Clean Code at the early stages Frankly, do you prefer Cowboy coding? After working in a number of companies, I am starting to realize that my commitment to writing high quality, well tested software, does not…
murungu
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19 answers

Dealing with management that does not see value in improvements that are not immediately visible to the user

I can understand schedule pressure. You want to please your users, as they are the lifeblood of the company. However, it is also true that certain changes will make everything easier down the road. Unfortunately, management in my organization has…
nameWithHeldToProtectTheGuilty
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How can I favor quick (and dirty) over clean (and slow) in practice?

Preface, TL;DR This question is about the implied tradeoff between the speed of development and the quality of code. I am looking for methodologies which can be followed in order to optimize development speed, even at the expense of code-quality and…
Gulzar
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Is DRY the enemy of software project management?

One of the most basic and widely accepted principles of software development is DRY (don't repeat yourself). It is also clear that most software projects require some kind of management. Now what are the tasks that are easy to manage (estimate,…
Frank Puffer
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How can I quantify the amount of technical debt that exists in a project?

Does anyone know if there is some kind of tool to put a number on technical debt of a code base, as a kind of code metric? If not, is anyone aware of an algorithm or set of heuristics for it? If neither of those things exists so far, I'd be…
Erik Dietrich
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Should non-priority technical debt tickets be pruned from backlog?

I regularly review the technical debt tickets from my backlog, to prioritize them and remove those which are no longer relevant (fixed by some other development, obsolete...) Among those with high priority, we take 2 or 3 in each sprint, and this…
Gua-naiko-che
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Develop fast and buggy, then correct errors or be slow, careful for each line of code?

Possible Duplicates: Frankly, do you prefer Cowboy coding? Prototyping vs. Clean Code at the early stages Good design: How much hackyness is acceptable? Does craftsmanship pay off? Which is better: Coding fast, not caring about possible errors…
Francesco Boffa
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How do you explain refactoring to a non-technical person?

How do you go about explaining refactoring (and technical debt) to a non-technical person (typically a PHB or customer)? ("What, it's going to cost me a month of your work with no visible difference?!") UPDATE Thanks for all the answers so far, I…
Benjol
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Are bugs part of technical debt?

Our Scrum Master keeps referring to bugs as technical debt. Is he right, are bugs considered to be technical debt in the world of Agile?
user86834
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Is technical debt management problem more of a culture issue or insight issue

Disclaimer: I don't expect zero tech debt. In this post, technical debt problem refers to severity that has been causing negative impact, say productivity. Recently I was thinking to build a tool to automatically generate tech debt report from issue…
shiouming
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How to measure the potential value of refactoring

On an old, large project with technical debt how can you reliably estimate or measure the benefit of refactoring code? For example, say you have some components within a software stack solution written in an older language, and some later…
Ewan
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Un-ticketed work, how much is too much?

We work in scrum teams with a product owner who is responsible for the backlog and prioritisation of that backlog. Recently the topic of un-ticketed work came up, developers for one of the applications are doing un-ticketed work that they regard as…
Sutty1000
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