An 8-Step Plan for Reducing Your Technical Debt Without Disrupting the Workflow in 2025
Commercial software development prioritizes putting the customer first, often focusing on delivering more features as quickly as possible. When deadlines loom, the temptation to implement features hastily, sometimes at the expense of best practices, can be hard to resist. While everything may seem fine on the surface, over time, this approach can lead to a tangled web of workarounds, patches, and shortcuts that become increasingly difficult to manage. This is how technical debt accumulates. Today, we’ll outline a nine-step plan for efficient technical debt management and share a list of tools to simplify the process even further.
1. Quantify and Prioritize Technical Debt
Before you start addressing technical debt, you need to know where it resides and its impact on your system. Take the time to catalog your technical debt and evaluate its severity. Here’s how.
Conduct Code Reviews and Use Code Analysis Tools
Effectively managing technical debt requires insight into the state of your codebase, and one of the best ways to achieve this is through the use of code analysis tools. Static code analysis tools can identify issues, such as code smells, high complexity, and duplication. By pinpointing problematic areas, these tools provide developers with actionable insights.
Examples of code analysis tools:
- SonarQube provides comprehensive insights into code quality, identifying bugs, vulnerabilities, and code smells. It’s an excellent tool for maintaining high standards in your codebase;
- PMD is focused on Java. It can analyze your code for potential issues and suggests improvements, such as removing unused variables or optimizing complex logic.
Use case in practice. Imagine your web development team is tackling an area of the codebase that’s notorious for being difficult to work with. By running a static analysis tool, you identify duplicated code that increases maintenance efforts and a highly complex function prone to errors. Armed with this information, your team can strategically refactor these areas while tracking the reduction in technical debt over time.
According to our experience, these tools are most appreciated by the team in the following two scenarios:
1. When a client comes to us asking to continue the development of a project because things aren’t going well with the current team. We need to quickly evaluate the provided code and make some predictions regarding future work. Naturally, we review the key code files ourselves to check for basic coding rules violations. Also, we use SonarQube to identify bugs and issues that are hard to spot during manual code review. For example, there might be a while loop that’s 150 lines long. Such a length clearly violates coding principles, but if the loop works fine, refactoring it might not be our priority. However, a loop of that length increases the risk of bugs, and SonarQube can flag potential issues. For instance, like this:
Is there a bug here, or is this a false positive? This question needs to be investigated. In any case, there’s something off either with the loop’s code or its condition that requires attention.
2. Integration of SonarQube with Git repositories for daily code checks. Code reviews don’t always identify all bugs and some issues can be overlooked. Especially when the client insists on minimizing the time spent on code reviews due to various business reasons. Such integration enables the quick detection of bugs and flaws, thereby reducing the cost of fixing them, as the developer still remembers what this code does.
Evaluate impact on business goals
Rank the debt by how it affects your organization’s goals. For example, if some outdated modules are slowing down critical features, that debt should take precedence.
Categorize by effort
Classify technical debt by the effort it would take to fix. This will help in allocating resources efficiently and tackling debt incrementally. Once you’ve assessed and prioritized technical debt, you’ll have a clear roadmap for what to address first without disrupting your workflow.
2. Integrate Debt Management into Your Workflow
One of the most common mistakes teams make is treating technical debt reduction as a separate project. Instead, weave debt reduction into your existing workflow to ensure it doesn’t disrupt your deliverables.
Adopt a “Boy Scout Rule” approach
Encourage developers to leave the codebase cleaner than they found it. If they’re working on a specific feature, they can refactor small portions of the adjacent code instead of focusing solely on feature delivery.
Introduce debt-focused sprints
Set aside specific sprints for addressing technical debt, perhaps once every few months. During these sprints, pause new feature development to work exclusively on refactoring and debt reduction.
Use feature flags
Feature flags, also known as feature toggles, are tools for reducing technical debt without disrupting the user experience or development workflow. They allow you to isolate and address technical debt while continuing to deliver value to your users. By toggling features on or off, you can refactor, test, and experiment without introducing instability into your production environment.
Examples of feature flagging tools:
- LaunchDarkly is a robust platform that provides granular control over feature rollouts. It allows teams to segment users based on criteria like geography, subscription level, or testing groups, enabling precise feature targeting;
- Flagsmith is a flexible open-source feature flagging tool that lets you manage feature toggles across environments. It supports A/B testing and provides real-time updates to ensure smooth rollouts.
Use case in practice. Suppose your team needs to refactor a legacy component while maintaining its existing functionality. Using feature flags, you can toggle between the old implementation and the refactored version for specific user segments or internal testers. This enables side-by-side testing without impacting all users. Additionally, if issues arise during the transition, you can quickly revert to the old implementation by simply toggling the flag off.
Flagsmith works exceptionally well in projects focused on modernizing legacy products. One of the key requirements for modernization is preserving the user experience (UX) that users have grown accustomed to over a decade of using the product. New technologies often bring new visions and concepts for user interfaces. Therefore, the modernized version of the product can closely resemble the old one in terms of control placement and other UX elements, but it will inevitably differ in some other aspects.
To ensure a smooth transition, we need to provide users with access to the modernized parts of the product step by step, and this is where Flagsmith shines. It allows us to use feature flags for the gradual rollout of changes. We can isolate the code undergoing modernization and enable it only for internal users or a specific group of users. Then, changes can be rolled out to other users while simultaneously monitoring their interactions with the new UI/UX using tools like Hotjar. This approach significantly reduces the risk of user dissatisfaction and potential issues.
Example: UI/UX Modernization for a Construction Management Web App
3. Automate Code Quality Checks
Automation is one of the most effective ways to manage technical debt without manual effort. By embedding automated checks into your CI/CD pipeline, you can enforce standards and prevent new debt from creeping in.
Rely on Linters to Maintain Code Quality
Linters are essential tools for maintaining a clean, consistent, and error-free codebase. By integrating linters into your development workflow, you can prevent small issues from escalating into larger problems and ensure a standardized codebase over time.
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