Technical Debt

When we activated static code analysis for the first time in one of my last projects, the overwhelming number of warnings exceeded expectations and highlighted gaps in the code. Without making any changes, the project already had a significant number of warnings. After activating additional analyzers and updating some configurations, this number temporarily increased dramatically.

The high number of warnings was initially daunting, but we saw it as an opportunity to significantly improve our code quality. At first glance, it seemed easier to suppress or ignore these warnings. But as I often remind my team, “The code you create is a valuable legacy, so it’s important to build it carefully.” Ignoring warnings today creates obstacles for future developers—and that could very well include you six months down the line.

This experience reinforced the importance of managing warnings and errors systematically. Let me share some of the lessons we learned, the strategies we used to tame those 60,000 warnings, and how you can apply these techniques to your own projects.

In software development, there’s a silent debt that accrues interest over time, often hidden beneath layers of code and decisions made in haste or ignorance. This debt is aptly termed technical debt. Much like the german proverb, “Wer den Pfennig nicht ehrt, ist den Taler nicht wert”, (or the english equivalent, “A penny saved is a penny earned”) technical debt reminds us that small oversights or compromises in the present can snowball into significant challenges down the road. This article critically examines the parallels between financial principles and technical debt, emphasizing the importance of addressing both direct and indirect debt while understanding its distinction from external risks such as hacking or abuse.

In software development, dependencies are inevitable - any project worth its salt relies on various libraries, frameworks, or packages. However, as I found in my own work, managing these dependencies can be an onerous task. Constant updates, new vulnerabilities, and endless manual approvals were draining my time and focus. What if, I thought, these processes could be automated? This thought led to the creation of dependamerge, a GitHub Action designed to free developers from the drudgery of manual dependency maintenance and let us get back to what we do best: building great software.

For over 12 years, NuGet package management has been part of the .NET ecosystem with direct integrations to various IDEs, CLIs and build systems. But a feature took 12 years before it appeared and certainly needs some more maintenance until it is mature!

Whatever our role, be it developer, IT professional or architect, we try to avoid technical debt. If this is not possible from the outset, or if we decide to accept this technical debt for a limited period of time, we usually lack the tools to do so. This is where this article may help.