NHO steps - Practice Group

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Engineering tech debt types

These are a proposed list of tech debt types.

• Local Debt
• MacGyver Debt
• Foundational Debt
• Data Debt

While these follow a humanistic heuristic, Fowler’s quadtrant is worth considering:

🎭	Reckless	Deliberate
Prudent	“We don’t have time for design	We have to ship now regardless of consequences
Inadvertant	What’s Layering?	We now know how we should have done it.

Some related thoughts from SO, here, and an awesome-list.

Analyzing a codebase

• Is there a dependency analyzer in-use already? If not:
  • What languages and libraries/frameworks are used?
    • do the framework(s) represent the domain concepts of the applications and business?
  • What are some commonly used external dependencies?
• What is the file structure?
• You’ve picked a file or a module – what does this file or module do and how does it do it?
• Identify coding style patterns.
• What’s your overall impression of the code quality?
  • Are there localized differences? Several?
• Fix bugs
• Write tests