Track technical debt at the source code level
Step 1: Capture
Add attributes to your production code where you find technical debt that you can not currently fix:
Install NuGet Package: TechDebtAttributes into your production assembly(s)
Use [TechDebt] attributes to when you find technical debt that you can't fix right away:
[TechDebt(10, 44, Description = "This is dumb, we should remove it")]
public interface ISomeDumbInterface
{
}In the example above, this debt has a pain value of 10 and an effort to fix of 44.
You decide what the relative values mean for these ints.
Step 2 Report
Install NuGet Package: TechDebtAttributes into your test project
Add a test in your test project to output a report of all tech debt:
public class WhatsTheTechDebt
{
[Fact]
public void ReportOnTechDebtButNeverFailATest()
{
var assemblyContainingTechDebt = Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof (SomeThing));
var report = TechDebtReporter.GenerateReport(assemblyContainingTechDebt);
Console.WriteLine(report);
}
} Run the test and get the report:
Start of Tech Debt Report - finding all [TechDebt] attribute usages
Benefit to fix: 1666.7 Void .ctor() Pain:5000 Effort to fix:3
Benefit to fix: 5 Quick fix to stop stupid stuff happening sometimes Void SomeMethod() Pain:5 Effort to fix:1
Benefit to fix: 2 ExampleUsage.SillyEnum Tomato Pain:47 Effort to fix:23
Benefit to fix: 0.3 This really is silly ExampleUsage.SillyEnum Pain:2 Effort to fix:6
Benefit to fix: 0.2 This is dumb, we should remove it ExampleUsage.ISomeDumbInterface Pain:10 Effort to fix:44
Benefit to fix: 0.1 This should be moved to it's own interface Void Y() Pain:10 Effort to fix:100
Benefit to fix: 0 There's a lot of work to fix this whole class for not much gain ExampleUsage.SomeThing Pain:1 Effort to fix:200
End of Tech Debt Report.
Step 3: Fail tests if too much tech debt exists (optional)
// This test will fail because there is more than total of 10 pain in all tech debt
[Fact]
public void ReportOnTechDebtAndFailTestIfTotalPainExceeded()
{
var assemblyContainingTechDebt = Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof(SomeThing));
const int maximumPainInCodebaseThatWereWillingToLiveWith = 10;
TechDebtReporter.AssertMaxPainNotExceeded(assemblyContainingTechDebt, maximumPainInCodebaseThatWereWillingToLiveWith);
}More examples:
About Jason Roberts
Jason Roberts is a Microsoft MVP, Pluralsight course author and Journeyman Software Developer with over 12 years experience.
He is the author of the books Keeping Software Soft) and C# Tips and writes at his blog DontCodeTired.com.