

Survey on Technical Debt Management - Mongoose
http://evanmeagher.net/2013/06/survey-on-technical-debt-management/

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jph
Technical 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.

~~~
nahname
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.

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michae2
Nice post, Evan!

