It Is Unwise To Ignore Tech Debt And Let It Accumulate

tips and tricks, guest post, grown up stuff, technology

In reality, financial debt may come handy in purchasing necessities or paying rent or mortgage, especially when one is struggling to make both ends meet. Financial debt may sometimes work to one’s advantage, but may also be a cause of problem when left unchecked. In the same manner, tech debt may be beneficial but may also pause major danger for software engineering and development firms.

Deal With It Like Financial Debt

You must deal with tech debt the same way you would financial debt as they both have the same cause and effects. In tech debt metaphor, it is the result of a quick and dirty way of coding process which is similar to financial debt where you behave impulsively and spend on things without much thinking. Like financial debts, tech debts also result in payments of interest which are in the form of extra effort given for the reworking, refactoring and addressing of the faulty codes. It is also the time and effort that you have to give for the future development that you have to make to eliminate any further quick and dirty designing.

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Strategies For Tracking + Paying Off Technical Debt

grown up stuff, guest post, tips and tricks, technology

When your development team runs out of time or funding in the late hours of any project, they end up making a compromise with the quality of the project and release defective codes which later leads to technical debt. The best practices of software craftsmanship are foregone, and your deliverables come out in the way in which you would have least expected. Tech debt occurs when there is no time to run tests on a project and is released for the users in the market and when codes are copied and pasted from previous ones without refactoring it properly. It is then that the requisites of a good code like script installation and technical standards are missing from the code.

Make Tech Debt Visible

It is better to make tech debt visible to your entire team who accepts compromises and is aware of what is going on with the code. You can make a big poster, write and tag stories which would enable everyone to see the debt items clearly. It must be shared across all your team members so that everyone is empowered to address these debt items. Make sure that they all can edit and augment all the debt items so that there are no barriers to documenting new items and address them. This would enable faster action and also the proper implementation of techniques.

Track Debt Items

It is also necessary to track debt items to resolution once the baseline for tech debt is captured and is made visible to all. It would enable better addressing of debt items by all the members of the team. You must also keep a regular track of a simple and quantitative metric system at the minimum and at a regular interval mentioning things like a total number of outstanding debt items as backlog each week. This is a useful way to track your team’s capability and skill in the development process, and you can be sure that there is a lack of alignment if at any point your team finds it necessary to add new tech items in the middle of their effort to close a particular debt item.

Group Your Debt Items

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out + about: attending my classmate’s birthday party

children's party, kids, out + about, birthday, birthday party

If you are in Grade 1 this school year, then you probably either celebrated your 7th birthday or you are being invited to your classmates’ birthday party. According to mum, turning 7 is a milestone in a child’s life that is why most children celebrate it with a party. I celebrated my 7th birthday last year, too, + have also been invited to a number of parties the last few months. The latest of which was the one I attended last weekend with mum.

children's party, kids, out + about, birthday, birthday party

It was my classmate Jewel’s party + it was held in a cool outdoor event venue in Guiguinto. Jewel + her family prepared a beautiful fair for all of her guests. Upon arrival, we were given stubs that we should use for each of the booths available at the party. There are so many booths that day, among them are for cotton candy, sweet treats and desserts, hotdog, french fries. There is also a photo booth, face painting,  several booths for fun games where I was able to win prizes with my friends by hitting a stack of cans with ball!

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