There are several tools and techniques that the software engineers follow to track and to communicate technical debt in a project. Understanding tech debt is the first step to address it properly so that you do not lose time and money any further. The open source project of health IT exchange and the government IT projects are very useful for such exploratory studies as experts usually apply informal and unspoken rules and practice to determine whether or not there are any issues in a project which could represent and give rise to technical debt in the future. These are done for the examination of the 1264 issues manually with the help of the four issues trackers along with the tech debt literature.
A Classification Method
There is a requirement of a specific method for the classification of tech debt and also to make an explicit identification of the same. Such a method would also enable in the repeated classification of such issues in a project. There should be some key decision points for the purpose and the process which are discussed as under. When you have a specific method, then it becomes easy for other members of the team to understand the issues and find ways for amendments which again can be understood by others.
Executable And Data Related
In most cases, there are a lot of confusion that arises regarding tech debt due to the over generalizing of the concept with the inclusion of several project management activities to it. Such activities include documentation, quality assessment and the requirement for analysis. The teams responsible for the development of a project to act on tech debt should be able to relate concrete artifacts for development like codes, data models, implementation units, unit tests and build scripts. This requires articulation of all the fuzzy concepts including bugs and defects in the project along with the concerned designing.
Defects And Bugs
A tool that identifies and classifies defects and bugs easily is important as these are the elements that make the incorrect functionalities visible to the end users. But usually, tech debt results in when issues are not visible to the end users due to faulty design. Therefore, what is needed here is to separate the system improvement issues from the defects. Also, there are some incorrect functionalities that should not be treated and considered as tech debt like a button not functioning properly in the user interface. Cleanup activities that affect maintainability and other design considerations like code duplication and type mismatch should be considered as tech debt.
Limitation Of Design Work
There may also be some limitations in the design work which should also not be treated as tech debt and should be categorized as design limitation factors. Inability to add any new features in a short time for easy maintenance, consequences of the refactoring are some of these limitations where the evidence of any side effect is not clear. Using such approach to classifying tech debt and paying them off just like you would payoff you multiple credit card debts with debt consolidation loans, is very necessary for survival.