5 Tips To Keep Technical Debt Under Control

In this video, I explain what technical debt is and the different types of technical debt to be aware of, and I share 5 tips for keeping technical debt at your company under control.

🔖 Chapters:
0:00 Intro
3:05 Deliberate technical debt
4:16 Accidental technical debt
5:34 Bit rot
6:16 Tip #1: Design before you code
6:58 Tip #2: Have a code review process in place
7:32 Tip #3: Make technical debt explicit
8:14 Tip #4: Leave room in your sprint to deal with technical debt
8:54 Tip #5: Prioritize technical debt items and note dependencies
9:20 Bonus tip: Introduce metrics to measure technical debt

#arjancodes #softwaredesign #python

[TheKhalamar]

The coin was to make people bring the carts back to the line, rather than leaving them in the middle of the parking lot where they either blocked parking spots or hit other cars. It was cheaper than paying someone to collect the carts.

To prevent people from taking the carts home, there usually is one wheel with some kind of mechanism that locks it whenever it crosses a line (the perimeter of the parking lot).

[MoreCharactersThanNeeded]

Can't believe you do not have more subscribers. The quality of your videos is amazing, and you touch relevant topics in a professor-esque manner. You are definitely a hidden gem.

[ArjanCodes]

Let me know you have any other tips for managing technical debt! And if you know more details about the how and why of the plastic shopping cart coins, I'm also interested :).

[kkiller]

In America, we have a grocery store chain called Aldi that uses quarters in their shopping carts to encourage people to put their shopping carts back rather than hire someone to go run around the parking lot collecting them. It isn't an antitheft measure since the quarter stays in the cart, so you never lose possession of your small piece of shiny copper.

[logank.]

One thing I've been struggling with on the team I'm currently on is trying to change the narrative around technical debt. They understand it exists but don't see the bad outcomes of not paying on their debts.
I've been trying to figure out a way to incorporate into the SCRUM process a way to measure technical debt so project and product managers have a way to visualize the negative effects of technical debt in a way that makes sense to them.
It's been an uphill battle but trying to use real world currency as a metaphor has been my starting point. I understand why it is important but other non developers don't see the importance of clearing their debt compared to new feature work.

[CodingEntrepreneurs]

Yet another amazing video! @ArjanCodes is an excellent teacher.

Keep it up mate! I’m learning loads from you!

[asdfspam]

I love your teaching style Arjan, and I’m learning a lot from your videos. Keep up the good work! 😄👍

[WolvericCatkin]

Yeah, we actually had a solution to that shopping cart thing in the UK... the exits to supermarket premises, have grills on the ground, and the carts have slots in their wheels, and if you try rolling the cart over these grills, the wheels get locked in the grill, so the cart can't go through the exit, unless you were to get a team to carry out over, a rather more conspicuous situation...

[digiryde]

Technical Debt is such a polite phrase.

[FelixFranz]

In my last job, after finishing a big migration project to a different datacenter provider, my boss said, that from experience, every decently sized and complex project will eventually it's own "list of 99 open and unfinished tasks". I'm not a developer, but operations guy, that somehow has to get the code working reliably and at scale. For most of those tasks, we just had to learn to live with it, because in general, we would need to put much more effort in closing them, than we would gain.
But most counterintuitively, after 2 years about 3/4 of the initial tasks were obsolete or replaced by different things. Just because everyone had moved on with technology :)

[gcl]

Excellent value in this video. A penny for your thoughts and a coin analogy for technical debt.

[wesselbindt]

3:10 was kind of hoping to see a shopping cart in the background there 😄

[jkrigelman]

That dog in the background was very interested in knowing more about technical debt. But the owner was more interested in getting more walking done.

I feel like there is another analogy in there about how managers encourage bad coding practices by pushing for results.

This channel works on so many levels that even background distractions are still trying to tell you something.

[ravphotos]

Getting rid of technical debt is a remedial matter. As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
By putting a label on technical debt items and including them in the kanban board, they appear as legitimate items to address, from the point of view of project managers. But many project managers are less likely to invest upfront in adopting strategic design approaches that will initially take more time to implement, but will pay dividends in the future, as they focus on the fast-approaching project deadlines.

this is emblematic of a larger syndrome - designers/developers rarely get recognized for preventing problems, but they always get recognition for fixing problems.

[simmerke]

Love the details you put in, the "technically it's debt" on the wall was a fun to spot.

[appy]

Great tips!!
The main thing we see is python or angular version in our services is outdated and still we take it to production. The effort required to update them is huge and it doesn't get prioritised and soon it becomes obsolete and then we write service from scratch.
This makes TIME TO MARKET really long and we loose customers.

[fuuman]

Wow, I can remember that you had <1k abos :D You are growing like crazy. Gratz!

[ignaciojavierhernandezgome]

Great video, like always!
Since y discovered your channel I'm addicted to it and the way you speak is perfect for practicing my English (hello from Spain), so double learning 😂
Keep going :)

[jamesgg]

Here's a tip for dealing with technical debt: verbally play out a likely case scenario if the debt goes unpaid and assess how that would effect income/sales.

[AlexGb]

Once again, a great video! I paused in between and subscribed to your mailing list 👍