Know the importance of code standards, reviews, documentation, and more
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…
Know what’s code churn and how to use it for measuring code quality
Organizations are continuously looking for ways to track, measure, and evaluate developer workflows. Done effectively, this creates the means to improve performance, code quality, reduce time to market, and increase profits. But it’s not always easy to measure efficiency: what may first appear to be evidence of a team’s hard work may be an indication of the bigger challenges and inefficiencies of code churn.
What Is Code Churn?
Code churn is a measure or indication of how often a file changes. …
Stepsize helps Engineering teams track and prioritise technical debt. Now, all of our product’s core features are available for free to all teams. In this article, you’ll learn about our journey and why we chose to go freemium.
Why freemium?
Our team has spent the last year building a powerful tool to help Engineering teams track and prioritise technical debt. We were getting a stable number of users each month and onboarded most of our customers by doing personalised demos and regular check-ins.
Along the way, we’ve learned a lot from the fast-growing companies we served, and gradually, the product was ready…
Originally published by Amneet at https://www.stepsize.com/blog/the-engineers-complete-guide-to-improving-velocity
In this article, you’ll learn what velocity means in the context of an agile/scrum methodology and how you can improve it to allow your team to move faster and ship more stuff.
Speed is a crucial ingredient to all companies, especially startups. The defining characteristic of startups that end up making it against the odds, is their ability to move fast. So what does speed mean for engineering teams? Velocity.
In this article, you’ll learn what velocity means in the context of an agile/scrum methodology and how you can actually improve it to allow…
We’re used to thinking that you cannot deliver fast AND maintain a healthy codebase. But does it really have to be a trade-off?
One of my greatest privileges building Stepsize has been hearing from hundreds of the best engineering teams in the world about how they ship software at pace while maintaining a healthy codebase.
That’s right, these teams go faster because they manage technical debt properly. We’re so used to the quality vs. cost trade-off that this statement sounds like a lie — you can’t both be fast and maintain a healthy codebase.
Last week we hosted a webinar where I interviewed Adam Tornhill, CTO & Co-founder of CodeScene, about technical debt: what is it, why is it important, and how to manage it effectively.
For this article, I’ve chosen some of the most interesting questions we’ve got from the audience. If you’re curious to learn more — check out the full version of the webinar.
Alex: I’m Alex, the Co‑founder and CEO of Stepsize. …
In this guide, you’ll learn all about refactoring source code: the benefits, challenges, tools, and best practices, and what is the difference between refactoring and technical debt.
Originally published at Tech Debt Blog by Cate Lawrence.
We’re all looking at ways to clean up our code, reduce complexity and improve functionality. Refactoring provides a way forward.
This guide will cover the following topics:
- What is refactoring?
- What are the benefits of refactoring?
- Technical debt vs refactoring
- Refactoring metrics
- Code refactoring examples
- Code refactoring tools
- Refactoring and the challenge for Engineering Managers
- Senior Management support for refactoring
- Team support and refactoring…
Hey! We’ve created a technical debt calculator — try it out!
We all know that technical debt has an impact on velocity, software product quality, and team morale — and that it ultimately has a monetary cost. But how much exactly does technical debt cost your company?
If you had to guess, what price tag would you put on your tech debt? A thousand dollars? A million dollars?
Well, now you don’t have to.
We’ve looked at the latest research and industry insights from Glassdoor, Raygun, DevsKiller, and Stripe and created the technical debt calculator that will tell you how…
If you are looking for a tool to start managing technical debt this article will help you make the right decision. We will look at the tools to track small, medium, and large pieces of debt and the process to reduce technical debt.
Originally published at https://www.stepsize.com/blog/tools-to-track-and-manage-technical-debt
Why tracking technical debt is important?
In the previous article, we looked at why managing technical debt is crucial. Technical debt happens when a development team speeds up the delivery of a project or functionality that will require refactoring later on. Technical debt causes delays in releasing new features, hinders innovation, and decreases the engineering team’s job satisfaction. …
If your organization has a lot of technical debt, chances are something (or everything!) will go wrong one day. Here is our collection of the scariest and the most entertaining tech debt stories!
Originally published at https://www.stepsize.com
Most people have encountered the silent company killer (tech debt) by now and luckily for us, they’ve been sharing their personal failures, complaints about the worst databases, and accidents that made companies lose millions of dollars.
Every time you’re prioritising a new feature over technical debt issues, you’re taking a huge risk. Are you ready to see how huge? Let’s dive in!
How to lose $462 million in 45 minutes
What happened?
Alex Omeyer
Building Stepsize, a SaaS company to measure and manage technical debt.
