DevOps is an amalgamation of philosophies, practices, and tools that addresses numerous developmental and operational challenges an organization faces, one of which is dealing with ‘technical debt’.
Technical Debt is accrued when less-than-ideal coding and design decisions are made – in order to get what the team requires now or if there is a need to go into production sooner.
TEST IN THE EARLY STAGES OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
This is a key DevOps Practice, to test early in the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), testing early is also known as “Shift-Left Testing”. It assists in finding and preventing errors from the early stages of the delivery process. It includes code coverage analysis, static code analysis, unit tests, as well as other code-level practices to catch errors at the earliest time possible where they cost the least to fix.
IDENTIFY AND RESOLVE MAJOR PROBLEMS FIRST
The DevOps Lifecycle has lean, short feedback cycles and faster iterations due to the enhanced level of collaboration between teams. This results in not having to wait until the next feature release to get a fix for bugs, security vulnerabilities, and usability issues, in addition, major complications that can affect users or operations are fixed instantaneously.
The process can be optimized further by defining a ranking for problems from low to high priority to help in deciding which issues should be attended to first. The team should be focus on solving these major problems first and not leave anything for a later time down the line.
CREATE IMPROVED COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE DEVELOPMENT AND OPERATION TEAMS
A possible reason for incurring technical debt or “code debt” is because development teams, regardless of how reluctant they are, may be forced into taking shortcuts to deliver on tight deadlines combined with struggling with constant changes or requirements. However, improving the collaboration between the Development and Operations teams can shorten the SDLC, and enable quicker deployments, in addition to increasing their overall frequency.
Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment and Continuous Testing can make it easier for teams to navigate and deal with changes. In general, cultivating a collaborative culture inspires code reviews, good coding practices, and robust testing with mutual help.
HIGHLIGHT MORE AUTOMATION
In automating tedious time-consuming tasks, and others that prove to be more prone to errors, your teams will be granted more time to repay technical debt. Additionally, automation that is rooted in CI/CD, in terms of automated testing and building, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) supports in recognizing debt earlier and facilitates continuous debt repayment. It also enforces code quality standards – hence, automation can reduce existing technical debt while also preventing any future debt.
MANAGE TECHNICAL DEBT
DevOps makes it easier to control and manage technical debt continuously. It empowers constant communication, allowing teams to track debt, incite awareness and resolve it as soon as possible. The appointed team leaders can also include a review of the technical debt into backlog and schedule maintenance sprints to deal with it promptly. DevOps also reduces the likeliness of having incomplete or deferred tasks in the backlog, further helping prevent incurring any additional debt.
CULTIVATE A DEVOPS CULTURE
In managing technical debt over long periods, a proper DevOps Culture will be the key. As we’ve said a number of times over, it encourages strong collaboration between cross-functional teams, provides autonomy and ownership, and practices continuous feedback and improvement. It’s a truly efficient platform in calculating and tracking technical debt whilst communicating it to other teams. A DevOps Culture can also be used as a way to educate and inform developers of the kind of codes that may introduce bugs and raise code quality.
DEFINE YOUR DEVOPS STANDARDS
A well-defined DevOps Standards will allow you to create quality gates for every code check-in before running tests and deployment. It saves your teams from repetitive, prone-to-error tasks while optimizing their development efforts. In enforcing certain DevOps Standards, it can also prevent your teams from cutting corners in the process, which is the major contributor to technical debt, thus, implementing exact DevOps Standards can maintain a high level of productivity and quality while ensuring excellent team morale and indirectly saving money for your organization.
SMOOTHER DEPLOYMENT PROCESS
You should consider utilizing containers to make deployments easier, containers are lightweight and portable and can simplify application development and deployment. A container orchestration tool like Kubernetes, automates container lifecycle in production, allowing your teams to focus on high-value tasks of refactoring apps. or lowering code debt.
APPLICATION PROGRAMMING INTERFACE (API) FIRST MODEL
The way application components communicate with one another is also critical in addressing technical debt, which can also be caused by different systems accessing services and data in ways that are unexpected to the team. If you implement APIs, it can make the interfaces more visible and increases the resilience of communications, due to bad links between different applications, an API-based model permits teams to make changes quickly without affecting the existing structure. In addition, any team that interacts with the service in question at a later date has a clearly defined set of expectations, as a result of this, it’ll be easier to roll out any changes/features with less technical debt.
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