You know I have been thinking hard about this. I came to the conclusion that the only way to reduce technical debt is to give developers "free time", that means a reserved amount of time each week (or sprint) where the developer can do whatever he wants as long as it improves code quality. Not just in the project's own database but also fixing a bugs or adding a features to an open source dependency. I would say that this time should be 1 day per week (20%). Of course this doesn't help for large scale refactors, but if you do this from the start large scale refactors shouldn't be necessary.
This is a good idea! We actually did this at my current company for about a year. There needs to be a little structure to this "free time", meaning it's helpful for people to state what they're going to be working on, so there's a little accountability. Regardless, it helped us keep our code base much cleaner.
The important part is that the developer should not have to haggle with their manager about the amount of time spent. In a previous job it was extremely hard for our team to be able to work on refactoring because of that
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You know I have been thinking hard about this. I came to the conclusion that the only way to reduce technical debt is to give developers "free time", that means a reserved amount of time each week (or sprint) where the developer can do whatever he wants as long as it improves code quality. Not just in the project's own database but also fixing a bugs or adding a features to an open source dependency. I would say that this time should be 1 day per week (20%). Of course this doesn't help for large scale refactors, but if you do this from the start large scale refactors shouldn't be necessary.
This is a good idea! We actually did this at my current company for about a year. There needs to be a little structure to this "free time", meaning it's helpful for people to state what they're going to be working on, so there's a little accountability. Regardless, it helped us keep our code base much cleaner.
The important part is that the developer should not have to haggle with their manager about the amount of time spent. In a previous job it was extremely hard for our team to be able to work on refactoring because of that