DevOps can minimize your technical debt

DevOps can minimize  your technical debt

26 Ağu 2022

4 dk okuma süresi

Technical debt cannot be avoided. It can also affect the quality of your product development process if it is not handled. Technical debt must be paid off eventually, but preventing it is preferable to pay it off later. Infrastructure and operations managers that actively control technical debt and shorten delivery times will achieve 50% faster turnaround times, claims Gartner. Many problems in the IT sector can now be solved using DevOps. It can also deal with the problem of technical debt.

How to reduce technical debt with DevOps?

Shift-left testing, also known as testing early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), is a crucial DevOps strategy that aids in detecting and preventing problems. It uses procedures like unit tests, static code analysis, code coverage analysis, and other code-level practices to find mistakes as early as possible and when they are the least expensive to fix. Additionally, testing as you go along enhances code design and makes it simpler for future development teams to comprehend. Early testing thereby lowers technical debt and, ultimately, costs.

Due to improved team cooperation, the DevOps lifecycle has lean, brief feedback loops and faster iterations. As a result, fixes for bugs, usability problems, and security vulnerabilities can be applied immediately. Major issues that could affect users or operations are also swiftly resolved. You can further improve the process by classifying or rating problems from high to low priority to decide which problems to address first. Then, put all your efforts into resolving the major issues first; do not save any for later.

In most cases, technical debt occurs because development teams take shortcuts to meet tight deadlines and struggle with constant changes. But better collaboration between dev and ops can shorten SDLC, fasten deployments, and increase their frequency. Moreover, CI/CD and continuous testing make it easier for teams to deal with changes. The collaborative culture encourages code reviews, good coding practices, and robust testing with mutual help.

Your teams will have more time to pay off technical debt if you automate repetitive, error-prone, and time-consuming tasks.

Additionally, automation integrated into CI/CD through automated build, automated testing, and infrastructure as code (IaC) provides ongoing debt repayment and facilitates earlier debt identification. It also imposes requirements for code quality. Automation can thereby reduce existing technical debt while preventing future debt.

The best way to manage technical debt is continuous, which is simpler with DevOps. Teams can track debt, promote awareness, and quickly resolve it, thanks to the ongoing communication that is made available. Team leads can plan maintenance sprints to address technical debt review as soon as possible and add it to the queue. DevOps also lessens the likelihood of unfinished or deferred jobs in the backlog, aiding in avoiding technical debt.

The secret to managing technical debt over an extended time may be a true DevOps culture. Strong cross-functional team collaboration is promoted by the DevOps culture, which also values autonomy, ownership, and ongoing feedback and development. It offers a useful tool for tracking, calculating, and sharing technical debt with other teams. DevOps culture may also be utilized to improve the quality of the code by educating engineers about the types of codes that lead to future errors.

Thanks to clearly defined DevOps standards, you can set up quality gates, run tests, and deploy when you check in new code. Your team's development efforts are optimized, and repetitious, error-prone manual tasks are avoided.

Enforcing DevOps standards also stops your teams from skipping steps in the development process, which is one of the main causes of technical debt (for example, cutting corners when writing code). As a result, strict DevOps standards may keep team morale high while maintaining a high production and quality level, saving your business money.

The DevOps team may find recognizing and eliminating technical debt simpler if the deployment process runs more smoothly. You might think about using containers to simplify deployments. Because containers are portable and light, developing and deploying applications is easier. The lifespan of containers in production is automated by container orchestration systems like Kubernetes, allowing your teams to concentrate on high-value work like rewriting apps or reducing technical debt.

To reduce technical debt, it is crucial to consider how application components communicate, as technical debt is frequently brought on by separate systems accessing services and data in unexpected ways.

API implementation boosts the visibility of interfaces and the longevity of connections. Teams can make changes fast in an API-based architecture without affecting current structures, thanks to the loose connectivity between applications. Any team that later interacts with the service in question has a set of expectations that are very well established. As a result, rolling out features and modifications is simpler and involves less technical debt.

Another clever technique to eliminate technical debt is to automate or streamline procedures that extend the development process time and expense but do not add value to the final product. Meeting compliance standards, compiling activity reports, and passing work from one person to another are examples of such jobs.

Additionally, you can construct self-service pipelines for routine processes like coding compilation, test execution, container building, etc. Teams benefit from time savings since they may devote more time to monitoring and lowering technical debt.

Technical debt problems are too complex for DevOps to handle. However, it can monitor code quality, decrease defects, and discover debt early, which reduces the buildup of debt and aids in keeping it below a manageable threshold. And even though you might not be able to solve all of your technical debt right now, these pointers will undoubtedly assist you in successfully dealing with technical debt issues.

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