Legacy code/Technical debt
I´ve been working around this tool for quite sometime now and I would like to know if that would be something valuable. It is designed to work for PHP projects and (very soon) Python3 projects.
You will have a visual interface to see how your technical debt is evolving after every change in your code repository, either GitHub or GitLab.
It is inspired in a similar tool I did in my previous day job and it was very useful across all dev teams.
Sounds interesting! I'm very interested in tools that can help teams improve their code.
In my mind, there are 2 kinds of technical debt; there are traditional code quality measures like Cyclomatic Complexity etc., but there are some kinds of technical debt that are also important but hard to measure (e.g. 'don't bother adding caching for this, just ship it and we'll come back to that later').
Being able to measure the first is definitely useful, but I also think developers instinctively have a feel for code quality, as they trip over the big classes and dependency messes every day when they're in the code. Finding the time to fix it is the hard bit (although good metrics would aid in convincing management that some paying down of tech debt is necessary, I'm sure).
I still haven't found a way to measure the second, and that kind of technical debt is often forgotten until it bites you later.
Thank you for your feedback. I had the same impression in different projects and companies. I will try to add a system to track that as well.
Sounds cool, can you explain a little more how it works, and the value proposition?
Are there ways to reduce technical debt with the tool?
The tool works by running a set of quality tools along with the configured tests and versioning the results with a proprietary system. The next time a change is detected the results are compared with the previous iteration and a report is generated.
The technical debt is easier to tackle this way so it can be reduced easily.
Sounds a lot like SonarQube or am I getting it wrong?
No, you are right. This tool will allow you to define a baseline for your legacy project, considering the legacy code you have, and keep those errors from producing 'green' builds. You will get warnings about the new errors popping up that have to be fixed now.
Sounds nice. I always found Sonar a little "overweight" and the user/project management used to be a mess.
Hello! We all have debts but the most important thing is not to have big debts. If you owe too much money, somebody will definitely hire collectors from https://www.frontline-collections.com/premier-debt-collection/private-debt-collection/ and you will bear loss.
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Same here, well the Go part. Would be interesting in something like this for Go !
Can you give me some hints about the quality tools used to track Go code? I know a bit about Python and PHP but not sure about Go.
The implementation should be pretty straightforward.