Category: Technical Debt

In our previous article, we talked about what is technical debt and how one strikes a balance between juggling code quality and its timely delivery. In this new blog, we have come up with a list of tools that will help you and your developers for assessing and acting on the analysis of your technical debt.

Let’s see what the tools are.

SonarQube

SonarQube, early known as Sonar, is an open-source platform that assists developers in improving their code quality. It comes with two customizable dashboards, called Global and Project. This makes it very clean as you can add or remove widgets as per your requirement. It supports more than 20 programming languages.

Widgets provide information like the number of days required (in terms of human resource) to fix code base issues, your technical debt ratio, technical debt pyramid, and many more details. All this makes your developer and QA testers’ life a bit easier and helps in keeping the reins of technical debt in check.

Bliss

Bliss focuses on your coding and testing quality. It’s a dashboard that uses numerous static analyzers for any reported flags and consolidates the said data for your team. Bliss helps in understanding the origin of how your technical debt accumulated over some time to a certain extent.

Integration with code repositories like Github, BitBucket keeps you informed on how your team code is and helps you understand what can be changed.

SQUORE

Squore is a commercial tool, but the setup is pretty easy. Squore is split into two sections, on the left are the projects, artifacts, and technical debt indicators, on the right, are various widgets.

It considers four factors for calculating technical debt. This includes efficiency, portability, maintainability, and reliability. When there is a violation detected in code, it’s added to the indicators and goes in the subset of that particular indicator as well.

You will also be able to see the distribution of your technical debt across functions, making it easier for your team to prioritize their tasks.

Teamscale

Yet another commercial tool Teamscale helps in assessing and controlling your code quality. It promotes transparency among your team members via clone detection for any redundancies in your code, unwanted dependencies with the help of architecture conformance analysis, and bug detection.

It is compatible with all major languages and version control systems. Using an incremental analysis engine delivers speedy feedback and sheds light on the root causes for potential issues. You will also get various IDE options, like plugins for Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ, and Visual Studio.

Kiuwan

Kiuwan is a SaaS-based commercial solution for code quality management. It has plans which offer static analysis, duplicate code detection, technical debt computation, what-if analysis, and possible solution road maps. This all is presented in user-friendly and customizable dashboards.

The dashboard is very easy to understand. On the left side of the dashboard, you will find a list of your analyzed projects and on the right, there will be quality analysis information. Kiuwan uses the “Checking Quality Model” which consists of five indicators, maintainability, reliability, portability, efficiency, and security for assessing your projects. And with this, there is a risk index and efforts to target the index as well.

All the tools mentioned above have been here for quite some time but unless you consider your resources and prospects, picking one will be difficult. But as the experts say, you can not go debt-free ever, neither debt is negative in every scenario. You need to strike a balance between timely code delivery and least compromise on quality ensuring that your technical debt never boomerangs back on you.

You can get in touch with us for any technical debt issues and maintaining manageable levels of the same, we are just a click away.

Technical Debt – also known as Code Debt, Design Debt, or Tech Debt is often the byproduct of speedy deliveries of the software.

There are times when the project manager has to make a strategic choice between speedier delivery and code quality. There may be scenarios where along with a tight deadline, you stumble across some new bugs or want to add on some interesting features in your product. The project managers may choose to opt for shortcuts and temporary fixes to speed-up the deliveries and come back to the bugs after the release. This leads to technical debt.

Technical debt is inevitable as software design and development decisions are also driven by business goals and deadlines. However, like other debts, it has to be paid off within a certain period to avoid defaults and even complete rework. We have also covered some tools that will make the payoff and technical debt management easier.

A Technical Debt leaves you with two options, either fix everything wrong in the code and miss the deadline or fix only what’s necessary and come back to the rest on a later date (without fail). However, many fail to do so, subsequently adding to the existing debt, which is even worse. So how to deal with it?

Let’s learn more about Technical Debt, its relation to software quality, and where to draw the line.

So, when is Technical Debt unavoidable?

• When another high-priority feature/ functionality needs to be attended because of a high opportunity cost.
• You are on a mission to get your product tested with your real users and can not miss the launch deadline. This implies you choose to go-live with a working product over a ‘flawless code’.

When is technical debt beyond tolerance?

• It’s hindering your user experience in numerous ways
• There’s a mountain of older debt that was never attended to in the first place
• It’s coming in the way of your product’s scalability and expansion plans
• Technology and tools used are obsolete in the current scenario.

Is there a connection between Software quality and Technical debt?

The answer is a yes, but not necessarily in a negative way. If someone claims that their technical debt level is low, it can mean several things. They could have missed many deadlines, deployed more resources (in terms of employees, efforts, and time) than required, or even went down the rabbit hole of over-engineering.

And the opposite can also be true. The answer varies from person to person. Finding the right balance isn’t easy, but one can always strive for it.

Managing your technical debt efficiently

As discussed above, there is a good and bad side to everything, technical debt included. A perfect, error-free code is never a possibility. There will always be some small bug, patchwork done to meet deadlines.

However, technical debt should not be the culprit behind sleepless nights. Here is how we manage it for our clients:

• Schedule regular clean-ups that go to the root of your technical debt. This means that you will have a spare more than a day regularly to keep your product’s technical debt within manageable limits.
• Make sure that any shortcuts, omitted code lines, or such trade-offs decisions are taken in your development stage are documented in a single and accessible place. Also, it must be recorded in a way that every team member can understand it and don’t end up wasting time in decoding the documents themselves.
• Inform stakeholders about your present technical debt levels. This will ensure that there is no surprise sprung on them when certain deadlines are missed.
• Implement automated unit tests during development stages. This will provide faster feedback and lead to quicker iteration cycles.
• Be on the lookout for newer technologies and possible industry disruptors. This will help you in anticipating the current relevance of the technologies deployed in your product. Also, when finalizing the tech stack of your products, ensure that the tools and technologies selected will be around for a long time and have active communities.
• If possible, have a dedicated team (can be a small one) exclusive for managing technical debt. Unanimously decide on the permissible level of technical debt with this team. And keep them involved in your development and testing process.
• This is specific to legacy codes. Factor in the relevance, time and efforts required, possible delays, testing, and team capabilities before you deep dive into it.

Leaving behind loads of technical debt is no wise decision. In the future, your team will dread going back to it, or even think of rewriting the entire code. But it is complementary to quicker iterations and release cycles. So ensure that you follow through with technical debt reviews regularly.

Feel free to get in touch with us here for any discussions on this or newer projects. We are always up for challenges and unique ideas!

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