Managing Tech Debt

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.

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.

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.

Browse & Interact with Issues Directly from the Editor

See how to browse, upvote, and mark issues as resolved directly in your editor.

Start Reducing Technical Debt with Stepsize

Here is how to get started with Stepsize to reduce your technical debt in 3 simple steps.

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 Might Not Know About

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.

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.

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?

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.

Expanded Free Tier, New Onboarding & Registration Flow

June has been packed with improvements under the hood, and we've shipped a few cool features that we're excited to tell you about!

3 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.

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.

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.

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 🛠).

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.

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.

Risk Estimates, Time Lost Dashboard & Teams

At the end of every month, we'll share the highlights of what our team has shipped to help you rein in technical debt. For this first edition, we'll go over the major changes from March & April.

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.

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.

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.

Big Announcement: Stepsize Is Now Free For Engineering Teams

Big news! Stepsize now has a free plan for Engineering teams to track and prioritise technical debt.

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.

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?

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.

The Ultimate 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.

Calculate The Cost Of Your Technical Debt

The technical debt calculator will tell you how much your company spends on technical debt each year.

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.

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.

Technical Debt Horror Stories

Here is our collection of the scariest and the most entertaining tech debt stories.

How Product Managers Can Help Reduce Technical Debt

Learn 7 actionable strategies that will help you prevent and respond to technical debt.

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.

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.

The Engineer’s Complete Guide to Technical Debt

In this guide, you'll learn metrics, statistics and tools that help engineering teams accelerate the software development process.

[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.

Take the test: your 'tech debt credit score'

Take the 1-minute test to see how close you are to technical bankruptcy.

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.

Track & pay back tech debt straight from VSCode

Identify, prioritise, and pay back technical debt using clear metrics.

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.

4 habits every engineering team needs to beat tech debt

The simple reasons tech debt is inevitable

What is Technical Debt, Really?

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.