The Technical Debt Prevention Clinic
summary
Defines technical debt as intentionally shipped but immature working code and contrasts that with outright bad code (bugs, copy/paste, flaky tests); recommends measuring trends with SonarQube, tracking velocity and incidents, and avoiding big rewrites that create “two messes.” Advocates iterative micro and limited macro refactors (one or two active), introduce behavioral tests, use CI/CD, and manage feature flags carefully to avoid flag sprawl. Promotes collaboration techniques like pair programming and mobbing to spread knowledge and prevent future debt.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction and agenda
- 1:53Understanding technical debt
- 6:19Identifying bad code
- 10:39Quantifying the problem
- 19:00Common pitfalls in remediation
- 24:10Strategies for reduction
- 32:03Feature flags and debt
- 36:13Cultural shift for prevention
- 43:57Collaborative development
- 54:20Best practices and conclusion
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