The first thing you must do when you want to address tech debt in your software development and engineering company is that you have to admit that tech debt is inevitable in such companies. You have, to be honest in it and not overlook a debt when you notice it. The next step is to identify it, take effective measures in reworking or refactoring it as soon as possible and avoid any further creation. All these identification and admittance is essential initially as it would help you to judge and take effective measures to regulate and control your tech debt with strategic plans.

Build A Team

You must also admit that you may be the sole owner of your company but the existence and survival of it is a team effort. You cannot do it alone and therefore build a team for this purpose. Your team must comprise of people who are disciplined and are well qualified to guide others to take any decision at the architectural level. Your team would help you to actively manage your tech debt. With your team, you can avoid any injection of new debts and also have a good working environment. Every team would communicate with each other ensuring all the defects are addressed properly and have a set of good and reusable assets.

Train Your People

Training is essential to have useful and effective codes designed at all times. With the help of your responsible and knowledgeable team all your staff, including non-technical persons, would get proper training and lessons to know the ways to look into existing tech debts and would be highly motivated to address them properly. Make them aware of the enterprise and teach them ways to enhance the company’s functionality by producing effective and reusable assets. The assets could be designs, patterns, templates, codes, services and much more. When you have a trained people working then, you can expect them to take responsibility instead of blaming other teams for defective codes.

Assess Code Quality

You must assess the quality of your code regularly by using several tools for analysis. You can click here to know more about such tools. This continuous process is required to know where the technical debt exists and thereby plan accordingly to address it. You can also see it trend, analyze and measure the level of the defect using different metrics like usability, quality, and other allied metrics. Apart from assessing and measuring the debt, you must also assess the right time to rework or add any new feature to the code without affecting its functionality.

Select The Right Way

Lastly, it is required to select the right way to address the code. Whether to refactor, rework or rebuild would entirely depend on the nature of the debt, the rate of interest and the magnitude of its effect on the code. Refactoring is easy and can be done with the simple splitting of a database or by renaming whereas reworking is more substantial and explicit. Rebuilding is a process when a code is completely non-functional and takes most time and effort.