How to Manage Technical Debt in Projects

Description:
Technical debt refers to the suboptimal technical solutions adopted during software development to achieve short-term goals (such as rapid delivery or simplified development). These solutions may lead to additional maintenance costs, reduced code quality, or hindered feature expansion in the long run. The core of managing technical debt lies in identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and regularly repaying the debt to prevent its accumulation from causing serious negative impacts on the project.

Problem-Solving Process:

1. Identify Technical Debt

   • Code Review: During development, identify temporary solutions, duplicated code, or complex logic through team code reviews. For example, code segments explicitly marked as "待优化" (to be optimized) in comments.
   • Tool-Assisted Analysis: Use static code analysis tools (e.g., SonarQube) to detect code complexity, duplication rates, or security vulnerabilities.
   • Team Feedback: Regularly gather pain points from developers, such as "a certain module is difficult to modify" or "testing takes too long," as these may signal technical debt.

2. Assess Debt Impact and Priority

   • Quantify Impact: Evaluate from three dimensions:
     • Development Efficiency: Does the debt lead to decreased development speed (e.g., increased debugging time)?
     • System Stability: Does the debt cause frequent failures or performance bottlenecks?
     • Business Risk: Does the debt hinder new feature delivery or increase security risks?
   • Priority Sorting: Combine project goals to categorize debt into:
     • Urgent: Debt that directly affects the delivery of the current iteration (e.g., causing tests to fail).
     • Important: Debt that will significantly increase costs if accumulated over the long term (e.g., continuous decline in codebase maintainability).
     • Deferrable: Debt with minimal impact that can be addressed later (e.g., style optimizations for non-core code).

3. Develop a Repayment Plan

   • Short-Term Strategy: Reserve time in each iteration (e.g., 10%-20% of development capacity) to address high-priority debt. For example, refactor associated complex code immediately after completing a new feature.
   • Long-Term Strategy: Incorporate technical debt into the project roadmap and establish dedicated refactoring cycles (e.g., quarterly). For example, plan a "Code Health Week" to集中解决累积问题 (集中解决累积问题: centrally address accumulated issues).
   • Debt Prevention: Establish development standards, such as requiring new code to comply with architectural standards and writing automated tests to cover critical logic, to avoid adding new debt.

4. Communication and Collaboration

   • Explain to Non-Technical Stakeholders: Use business language to explain the impact of technical debt. For example: "The current payment module's code is chaotic. Each modification takes 3 days. After optimization, this can be reduced to 1 day, improving customer demand response speed."
   • Team Consensus: Make the debt list transparent through a technical debt dashboard (e.g., Jira board), enabling team members to participate in decision-making for the repayment plan.

5. Monitoring and Iteration

   • Regular Reviews: Check the progress of debt handling during iteration retrospectives and adjust strategies. For example, if bugs decrease by 30% after debt repair, it proves the repayment is effective.
   • Metric Tracking: Monitor code quality metrics (e.g., unit test coverage, CI/CD build success rate) to ensure sustainable debt management.

Summary: Technical debt management is an ongoing process of balancing short-term delivery and long-term health. Through systematic identification, prioritization, and planned execution, it can be transformed into a controllable project risk rather than a hidden crisis.