How do you manage to stay on top of technical debt?
Quality unit tests with decent code coverage, keeping dependencies to a minimum and vetting them prior for community/financial support before installing/using. When dependencies are being used, I constantly check/scan/read the change-log and I make the effort to constantly update.
opinion: I really think the word choice of technical debt, emphasis on debt is the perfect name/term (naming is hard), because it really does accumulate compounded interest of pain over time; just like in finances if you let it accumulate too much you usually file for bankruptcy.
How have you been bitten by it in the past?
Kicking the can down the road, ie: we'll fix it in the next release/version
Quality unit tests with decent code coverage, keeping dependencies to a minimum and vetting them prior for community/financial support before installing/using. When dependencies are being used, I constantly check/scan/read the change-log and I make the effort to constantly update.
opinion: I really think the word choice oftechnical debt, emphasis ondebtis the perfect name/term (naming is hard), because it really does accumulate compounded interest of pain over time; just like in finances if you let it accumulate too much you usually file for bankruptcy.Kicking the can down the road, ie:
we'll fix it in the next release/versionHaving good code coverage definitely helps with ensuring an upgrade won't break something critical.
And yeah, procrastination can kill maintainable software.