You're struggling with technical debt accumulation. How do you balance feature delivery and code quality?

The development teams expediting the delivery of a functionality because of deadlines and piling it up with more new features and changes on top of the same code is a major reason for accumulation of tech debt. Decoupling code, making it more flexible and modular makes it easy to modify or add new features and scale the application. This also helps us eliminate any duplicates or unnecessary blocks of code. Decoupling is the key aspect of it as the end-user / customer who uses the application shouldn’t face any drastic change in the way they consume our app with each and every minor or major fix versions we release.

One way to simply understand code debt is to ask few simple questions Q: Is this piece of code something that i need? Q: Whats the easiest way to do it if I were to write it from scratch? Q: Are you duplicating something? Q: What is your code dependent on? Way to set priority for elimination of code debt? Q: Can I live with this debt for now, if yes for how long? Q: Is the debt interest free? if no how much tax in terms of time it is consuming? In one line, only eliminate it if its worth it??

In order to balance feature delivery and code quality, while fighting the accumulation of technical debt, it's important to prioritise technical debt resolution while still delivering features. One approach is to allocate a percentage of each sprint to addressing technical debt, while ensuring that new features are developed. It is also important to involve the development team in discussions about technical debt, and to prioritise which areas need to be addressed first. By striking a balance between feature delivery and code quality, you can prevent further accumulation of technical debt and ensure a more sustainable development process in the long term.

Identify and categorize technical debt. Assess its impact on the system's performance, scalability, and maintainability, and prioritize it alongside new features

Balancing features and code quality is like keeping a clean house. Ignoring technical debt is like pushing dust under the rug - it grows unseen until it becomes a huge obstacle. Regular maintenance, like bi-weekly reviews to prioritize and tackle technical debt, prevents it from snowballing and keeps your development running smoothly.

The first step in effective prioritization is understanding the impact of technical debt and the effort required to address or perform tasks. Two popular methods for estimating effort are 'T-shirt sizing' and 'poker planning.' The former uses three categories—S, M, and L—to compare tasks. The latter employs Fibonacci numbers (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc.) to provide more nuanced difficulty levels. The impact of technical debt can be measured using observability tools and processes, which monitor production systems and provide a more realistic perception of how the debt affects performance and stability.

I thinks this depends on the velocity at which code is being developed. If its high enough, chances are you might be refactoring something which is deprecated. For this I would suggest for code to mature enough in time which helps you what and why to refactor, this will give you the best return of your time

Dedicate a portion of each development cycle specifically to addressing technical debt. Regularly refactoring code helps prevent debt from becoming unmanageable.

It's a good practice to reserve a regular portion of your development cycle for fixing technical debt, such as 30% of the cycle's available time. However, you cannot set it and forget it; you need to validate whether this time allocation is sufficient. Continuously track if your team is reducing technical debt and adjust the reserved time as needed. Additionally, it's important to verify if the debt was resolved within the expected time frame or if it required more time than planned.

One of the simplest way to address technical debt is to always improve the code base a little bit each time you develop a new feature. It will only take you a few minutes to refactor a few lines of business logic or a single function but doing that over time will compound and you will end up with a much cleaner code. As Uncle Bob suggests: "Always leave the code you've worked on cleaner than you found it."

Automated tests provide greater security during breaking changes and refactoring in the development cycle, as long as they are run regularly and before each deployment process. They ensure that all expected workflows function correctly and no new bugs have appeared. When fixing technical debt, by definition, we are not adding new features, so previously automated tests should run and produce the same results they were initially coded to. If their results change, it indicates that the technical debt may have been resolved incorrectly and should not be deployed.

Majority of the technical debt can be easily avoided with some good code review practices. There is a high chance that your codebase will be cluttered and full of issues if your team doesn't include code reviews in their development processes or the reviewers are not doing their job correctly and just lazily approve PRs. Ensure that there are some basic rules in place, educate your team on the benefits of a quality review and lead by showing them how to do it. Following this should definitely reduce the amount of technical debt you and your team have accumulated.

Often overlooked as a simple checkpoint, peer code reviews can be a game-changer in SDLC. They act as a double-edged sword, identifying bugs before they cause issues in production, while simultaneously creating a knowledge-sharing environment. By emphasizing code readability, maintainability, & adherence to established standards, reviews ensure a consistent codebase that everyone on the team can navigate and adapt with ease. This mandatory practice goes beyond just technical benefits. It cultivates a sense of collective ownership, where developers become invested in the overall health of the codebase. This shared responsibility fosters a more collaborative team environment, where everyone is working together to achieve coding excellence.

In the context of technical debt, code reviews can help stabilize the amount of debt by preventing new issues from arising and by tracking existing ones. New debt often appears when there isn't enough time to solve a problem or develop a feature properly. A thorough code review by another developer can help identify alternative solutions that avoid creating new debt while still meeting deadlines. Additionally, code reviews can reveal debts that other developers might have overlooked. A fresh perspective can spot issues in the code that need to be addressed later as technical debt

Tech debts can cause major performance and security issues if not dealt early. To avoid this we should ensure that all of our tools to identify tech debts must be enabled all the time. The tools can be sonar,snyk fitted into the deployment pipeline. Also the second way to deal with it is whenever you have functional requirements and there is a tech debt in the same functionality or the code then it is better to take care of the tech debt along with functional requirements keeping all the stakeholders align.

CI/CD practices can streamline the integration of new features while maintaining quality, as they involve frequent testing and integration.

From my experience, technical debt (tech debt) tends to come from “coding without planning” or being rushed to complete a deadline. Plan and organize your code; think “will this be scalable in the future?” If you write code correctly the first time, you won’t have to go back and fix it later ??

Educate stakeholders about the impact of technical debt on long-term project health and feature delivery. Ensure they understand the trade-offs and support time allocation for addressing technical debt.