Survey on Technical Debt Management
evanmeagher.netTechnical debt pain points are great areas for startups to tackle IMHO.
I'm working on a large upgrade project for custom messaging workflow, developed ad hoc during the past six years, without tests and specs.
If a startup offered developer tools to help with this, we'd pay many thousands of dollars.
Here are areas where I'd pay money right now-- because right now I'm essentially writing simple tooling for my team, and it would be better, cheaper, and faster to buy professionally-developed tools:
* Replatform from one MVC framework to another. For example from TurboGears to Rails.
* Refactor unchecked exceptions to explicit error handling of return codes, for example from Java to Go.
* Some kind of visualization that highlights the business value of various code paths, for example to discover the code paths that my highest-value users are taking.
Perhaps these kinds of tools exist already-- if you know of them, I'd be very happy to know more.
The only tool that I have found to help with those kinds of problems is a human being and lots of hard work. The more short cuts you try to take, the worse it will be for you in the end.
I've come across tools that claim to expose and measure potential technical debt, such as techdebt.org or SQALE (http://www.sqale.org/details). I'd be skeptical of any software that claims to provide an automated mechanism for paying down debt. The consequences of debt are too varied and subtle to be generalizable.
Nice post, Evan!