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 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.
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
Take the test: your 'tech debt credit score'
Take the 1-minute test to see how close you are to technical bankruptcy.
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.
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 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.
Track & pay back tech debt straight from VSCode
Identify, prioritise, and pay back technical debt using clear metrics.
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, 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.
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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 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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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 🛠).
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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.
