To manage the task priorities, software developers use issue trackers which are an important end efficient tool to communicate tech debt. This makes an identification, addressing and communication with the other team members easy and effective as well. It is often found that even when developers indicated the details of the tech debt in a project in their report; those are often not prioritized while paying back the tech debt. Addressing the symptoms of tech debt items and thereby tech debt, on the whole, may be done, but the underlying causes may not be rectified.
Standards Of Reports
There are certain standards set by the government that is required to be maintained to provide bug reports with relevant and enough information so that those could be reproduced and fixed with ease. All the essential properties of it are encoded in the predefined fields that are in the issue trackers. Though these fields are necessary but are not sufficient to describe and address tech debt. There is some research that has been conducted on tech debt in a project to offer specific templates to report about tech debt. Such templates have similar goals with a slight difference that the concepts used in such templates are driven and based on the financial analogy of the project.
Estimating Principal And Interest
Care has been taken in such practice so that the estimation of principal and interest of the tech debt does not overlap or eat up the time of the developers for their required daily tasks. Such analysis demonstrates tech debt as a concrete effect when related to the software units and not with the artifacts of the software process, which includes documentations as well as requirements. Such a refined scope for development and identification helps the software developers along with the stakeholders to understand technical debt better and consider it as the accumulated items that are related to the software system.
Tech Debt Item
Tech debt item is a sole element of the debt which connects with a set of various development artifacts of the system. The consequences of it affect the value, quality and also the cost of the system. The causes of it are varied as well which may be related to the management, process, context as well as the goals of the business. There are several properties to describe a tech debt item based and related to the concept of it which can make a code defective. But just as credit card consolidation loans for bad credit are available to survive, you have to pay it off your bad code also to keep your business moving.
The Properties Of Items
The properties of tech debt item help the developers to understand the tradeoffs and its long-term consequences of tech debt. They can make arrangements for additional and required resources to communicate with the management, write issue descriptions to make it more visible, increase the degree of automation to classify issues as tech debt. No ambiguous or missing elements are left out to justify the budgeting resources to pay back tech debt.