Why Bother Writing Code Comments?

In most cases, you aren’t the only person working on the same project or codebase. That means that other people get to read your code and have to understand it. That’s also true for the code comments you leave behind. Developers often write quick and dirty comments without much context, leaving other developers clueless about what they’re trying to say. It’s a bad practice that only creates more confusion rather than clarifying things.

So, yes, you should be bothered with writing meaningful code comments to help other developers. A code comment that describes the function, the reasoning behind the function…

Developers deal with technical debt every day, and they know how to prevent and manage it better than anyone else. Here’s just some of what they had to say.

Plenty of people have written about technical debt. They might be discussing it in the context of improving velocity, code churn, code refactoring, or it might just be an item on a very long to-do list that never gets prioritised. We put out a call out for real-world experiences of what helps when it comes to reducing technical debt and received a huge number of responses from devs across a variety…

There’s plenty of jokes around technical debt, but what happens when companies leave it to languish? I asked a bunch of developers to share some of their horror stories of technical debt.

Profit Loss

Arthur Linum is a technology consultant. He shared some of his experiences with me:

“I was the consultant for a startup that had accumulated substantial technical debt. They had rushed to meet tight deadlines to position themselves at the forefront of the market, and this had led to code that was quick and dirty.

Unfortunately, their technical debt caught up with them. Their poorly designed code demanded a…

TODOs are a tricky subject for developers. Many codebases are guilty of having TODOs linger around while nobody knows who’s responsible for a TODO or even has the required context to tackle it. Yet, should we feel ashamed for our lingering TODOs?

Many developers have adopted the approach of adding TODOs to their project’s code. However, it’s not necessarily the best approach to manage them. It makes more sense to extract TODOs to a centralised interface that allows you to actively manage them and add metadata such as context, feature descriptions, requirements, or even relevant code snippets.

This article discusses…

Refactoring improves a code’s internal structure according to best practices or rules without altering the current behavior. You often see development teams plan a refactoring week to evaluate the code’s architecture and internal structure before starting a new development cycle. It’s important for engineering teams to address technical issues continuously and have regular discussions about maintenance and code quality.

Code refactoring is an important activity to improve the code’s quality and maintainability. It’s much easier to build new features on top of clean code, but it will also benefit you when writing tests.

This article looks at how you can…

Software developers need to constantly nurture their product to enhance its functionality, and reduce deterioration, satisfy the needs of users and ensure the success of their product. This is achieved through software maintenance.

Software maintenance is a critical part of the software development lifecycle. Many companies are embracing DevOps principles and processes. This includes shifting left, performing testing early in the development cycle to be able to identify and respond to problems as soon as possible. But even when software is released, it’s not a case of launch and forget.

Software developers need to constantly nurture their product to enhance…

Originally published on Managing Technical Debt Blog by Cate Lawrence.

Every person in your company probably has a different opinion about what’s the company’s biggest priority. But which project should be prioritised? Fortunately, there are great methods to help you prioritise your product backlog.

This article will cover the following topics:

• Product Manager: More mad skills than a cat herder
• What is the Product Backlog?
• What are the Product Backlog tasks?
• The importance of prioritising your backlog
• 5 things no one mentions about prioritising the product backlog
• Method 1: Impact effort matrix
• Method 2: Stack Ranking
• Method 3: The MoSCoW…

You might not realize it, but you probably know when you see bad quality code. It might be written in a way that doesn’t make sense or be full of errors, excessively verbose, or highly inconsistent in its use of terminology and naming conventions. Fortunately, there are lots of ways you can improve your code quality, make it easier to review and test, and reduce the pain later of having to fix all of the errors. Let’s take a look.

What Is Code Quality?

Code quality refers to the attributes and characteristics of your code. These may differ according to your organization’s specific business…