Technical Debt: Lessons from 10 Years of Change
What can we learn from 10 years of change in software engineering, and the impact of technical debt on code quality and outcomes?
Why it’s Time to Shift Left Technical Debt
We need to talk about shifting tech debt left. Here’s how we can improve codebase health and push quality upstream by focussing on tech debt.
How modern engineering teams approach refactoring
Having a great refactoring process is an integral part of software development. In this article, we outline how modern teams continuously refactor and tackle technical debt.
How to Reduce Time Spent on Refactoring?
Recently, I had to deal with an old codebase that was difficult to maintain and scale. In this article, I'll share how my team and I decided to deal with maintenance and the best practices we implemented to reduce time spent on refactoring.
The Engineer's Guide to Creating a Technical Debt Proposal
This article will guide you through the process to craft a technical debt proposal to justify the time spent solving technical issues.
How one small change allowed Terakeet to fix 70% of their technical debt
Learn how Stepsize customer Terakeet resolved 70% of their critical technical issues.
Measuring Sprint Velocity: Formulas & Mistakes to Avoid
We’re going to look at what sprint velocity is, how it can affect your development cycle, and what formulas you can use to measure sprint velocity.
Product Documentation: Types and Best Practices for Devs
Here's how to communicate new features to external users and structure product tutorials and guides.
The 3 Best Tactics to Prevent Technical Debt
The negative impact of technical debt on businesses is massive. Here are the best ways to prevent and manage technical debt that both startups and enterprise companies can implement today.
An Engineer's Guide to TODOs: How to Get Things Done
A lack of focus, lack of visibility into our codebase problems, and context switching decrease developer productivity. Here are the best ways and tools that'll help you get things done.
Developer Productivity Tools: 17 Trending Apps You Need to Try
To help you build the ultimate workflow, we went looking for the developer productivity tools that are currently trending in coding communities.
10 Must-Know Patterns for Writing Clean Code with React and TypeScript
Clean code is a reader-focused development style that improves our software quality and maintainability. Here are the 10 most important patterns that'll help you write clean code with React and TypeScript.
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The Power of Code Refactoring: How to Measure Refactoring Success
Many engineering teams struggle to measure the effectiveness of their refactoring efforts. Let's look at the 5 metrics that will help you measure refactoring success.
How Arcane fixed 50% of their technical debt and improved productivity, quality, and morale
Learn how the Arcane team achieved tech debt visibility and fixed half of their codebase issues with Stepsize.
8 Top Metrics for Measuring Your Technical Debt
Technical debt metrics help you to monitor deficiencies in your current codebase. We decided to look at how they work, and pick out the best tracking tools.
Why TODOs and Jira Tickets Are not Working Anymore
Here's how you can improve your engineering team communication to transform a codebase health.
Software Engineering Best Practices That High-Performing Teams Follow
I've deliberately approached this article with broad strokes to move a little beyond the typical laundry list. Let's take a look at the software engineering best practices that high-performing teams follow.
Top 20 Web Development Learning Resources
These 20 online learning platforms will help you learn web development from beginning to advanced level and grow as a professional.
Code Review: A Comprehensive Checklist
This code review checklist will help you give actionable and valuable feedback to your peers.
How to Measure Code Quality: 7 Metrics Every Engineer Should Know
High-quality code is critical to creating functional error and bug-free software that is easy to edit and understand. But while we sometimes spot our own errors, we need to really dig a little deeper.
How To Reduce Context Switching as a Developer
Context switching prevents developers from finishing tasks quickly and getting into deep work. Let's look at how to avoid constant context switching to improve your productivity.
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Stepsize vs Code Quality Tools
Stepsize is a powerful tool that helps Engineering teams fight technical debt and improve their codebase health. Here is how it's different from the code quality analysis tools.
5 Best Project Management Tools You Need to Try in 2022
Sprint planning meetings of old consisted of a whiteboard, marker, and post-it notes. But these days, digital tools have emerged that make planning more effective, leading to a more successful sprint.
How to Run an Effective Sprint Planning Meeting + Tips to Plan Technical Debt Work
I want to offer practical strategies to make planning a Sprint less painful so that you feel organised rather than overwhelmed, and give tips on how to include technical debt work into your sprint.
When Should I Refactor Code and How to Get Buy-in for Refactoring?
Let's take a look at when you should consider refactoring your codebase and how to convince your management to spend time on refactoring and technical debt.
Can Low-Code Really Solve the Problem of Technical Debt?
Software vendors are presenting a plethora of low-code software solutions to reduce the mundanity of software development. But, what are their actual advantages, how can they reduce, and also cause technical debt?
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4 Most Important Metrics For Engineering Team Performance
What’s the overall performance of your engineering team? It's a question many development teams can’t answer. Let’s look at how we can improve your team’s performance.
Snyk Delivers the Highest Quality Software Using Stepsize to Prioritise Technical Debt
The Snyk team aspires to ship flawless software at the highest pace possible while keeping their engineers happy. To do that, they turned to Stepsize and built an effective process to manage technical debt.
Developers Share How They Prevent and Manage Technical Debt (Part 2)
Developers deal with technical debt every day, and they know how to prevent and manage it better than anyone else. Here’s just some of what they had to say.
Developers Share Technical Debt Horror Stories (Part 1)
There’s plenty of jokes around technical debt, but what happens when companies leave it to languish? I asked a bunch of developers to share some of their horror stories of technical debt.
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4 Ways You Can Organise Your TODOs as a Software Engineer
TODOs has been a great organisational tool for decades. It’s a simple method to manage your work and remind us of unfinished tasks. Here are the 4 best ways to organise your TODOs.
How to Refactor Code in Visual Studio Code
This article looks at how you can refactor your code using Visual Studio Code (VS Code) and Visual Studio Code plugins.
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What Do You Need to Know about Software Maintenance Types as an Engineer
Software developers need to constantly nurture their product to enhance its functionality. This is achieved through software maintenance.
How to Prioritise Your Product Backlog
Every person in your company probably has a different opinion about what's the company's biggest priority. But which project should be prioritised? Fortunately, there are great methods to help you prioritise your product backlog.
What Lies Beneath Hard Work: Code Churn
What is code churn, how to measure it, and what insights can it provide about your code quality and team performance? Learn in this article.
How to Maintain a Healthy Codebase while Shipping Fast
We're used to thinking that you cannot deliver fast and maintain a healthy codebase. But does it really have to be a trade-off?
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Technical Debt: An Interview with Adam Tornhill
Last week we hosted a webinar where Alex Omeyer interviewed Adam Tornhill about technical debt: what is it, why is it important, and how to manage it effectively.
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Calculate The Cost Of Your Technical Debt
The technical debt calculator will tell you how much your company spends on technical debt each year.
Tools to Track and Manage Technical Debt
If you are looking for a tool to start managing technical debt this article will help you make the right decision. We will look at the tools to track small, medium, and large pieces of debt and the process to reduce technical debt.
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Technical Debt Horror Stories
Here is our collection of the scariest and the most entertaining tech debt stories.
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How Product Managers Can Help Reduce Technical Debt
Learn 7 actionable strategies that will help you prevent and respond to technical debt.
6 Reasons to Start Managing Technical Debt in 2021
Setting your 2021 business goals? Here are 6 reasons why managing technical debt should be part of your plan.
The Cost of Technical Debt
How much does technical debt cost your company? Let's look at what the research says about the real cost of technical debt.
[Webinar] How to deal with tech debt—Lessons learned from the best engineering teams
In this webinar, you will learn to define tech debt and the tactics for dealing with small, medium, and large pieces of tech debt.
Lessons interviewing 200+ engineers: the perfect process to manage tech debt
In last six months, I've interviewed more than 200 experts, to understand how tech debt is handled at growing software companies.
How to convince people to deal with tech debt
In this post, I'll share with you how the best in our field make the business case for any given piece of tech debt.
How to be an Effective Boy/Girl-scout Engineer
Always leave the code better than you found it - it's that simple, yet not everyone is doing it. Let's figure out why.
7 examples of sneaky tech debt and how to spot them
Some examples of tech debt we've spotted in the wild, to help you identify it in your codebase before it catches you off-guard.
How tech debt impacts everyone in the company
We go through the meta-problems caused by tech debt, and discuss exactly how they affect each area of any software business.
What is Technical Debt in Agile?
Everyone thinks they know what technical debt is, but what is it really? And how does it impact your organization?
3 Technical Debt Metrics Every Engineer Should Know
Looking to measure technical debt? Here are the top 3 tech debt metrics you should be measuring.
How to stop wasting engineering time on technical debt
If you’ve ever argued for carving out time for this, you know that it can feel like a crusade of epic proportions.
The one cultural characteristic you need for a healthy codebase
Let's look at the types of an engineering culture of code ownership and why it is so important.
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On-Demand Webinar: Technical Debt with Adam Tornhill and Alex Omeyer
In this Ask Me Anything webinar, we discussed some of the most common & controversial topics around technical debt together with the two technical debt rockstars: Adam Tornhill and Alex Omeyer.
On-Demand Webinar: How to Prioritize Technical Debt as a Product Manager
In this webinar, we discuss the most practical way of prioritizing technical debt.
The Engineer’s complete guide to writing excellent internal documentation
Having internal code documentation can transform your engineering team. It allows you to capture knowledge and encourage active knowledge sharing. How should you approach internal documentation? Let’s take a look!
The Engineer's Complete Guide to Backlog Grooming
Without organisation, backlog gets messy quickly and issues can’t be prioritised. Let's look at how Engineers, Product Managers, and the rest of the team members can work together to keep tasks organised.
The Engineer's Complete Guide to Legacy Code
In this guide, you'll learn what is legacy code, its characteristics, tools and the best practices for working effectively with legacy code and technical debt.
The Engineer’s Guide to Writing Meaningful Code Comments
In this guide, you will learn why it is important to write code comments, what are different code comment types, and the 4 best practices for writing meaningful code comments.
The Engineer’s Complete Guide to Code Quality
There are lots of ways you can improve your code quality, make it easier to review and test and reduce the pain later of having to fix all of the errors. Let's take a look.
The Engineer’s Complete Guide to Improving Velocity
In this article, you’ll learn what velocity means in the context of an agile/scrum methodology and how you can improve it to allow your team to move faster and ship more stuff.
The Complete Engineer's Guide to Code Refactoring
In this guide, you’ll learn all about refactoring source code: the benefits, challenges, tools, and best practices, and what is the difference between refactoring and technical debt.
The Engineer’s Complete Guide to Technical Debt
In this guide, you'll learn metrics, statistics, and tools that help engineering teams manage technical debt and accelerate their software development process.
Browse & Interact with Issues Directly from the Editor
See how to browse, upvote, and mark issues as resolved directly in your editor.
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Start Reducing Technical Debt with Stepsize
Here is how to get started with Stepsize to reduce your technical debt in 3 simple steps.
JetBrains Plugin & Linking Code to Issues
This month marks the release of a major update to our JetBrains IDE plugins — and we do mean major! We've rebuilt it from the ground up to leverage new JetBrains APIs and bring you the features we introduced in VSCode recently.
Bookmark Code, Create Issues from VSCode, See Your Team's Activity
This month we've created a new homepage for your team in the web app and completely rebuilt our VSCode extension (JetBrains IDEs are up next 🛠).