This session provided a basic look at technical debt – what it is and where it comes from. It also offered some suggestions on working with legacy code and Helix together. Here are my key takeaways:
- What is technical debt?
- A measure of how untidy your code is
- Any time when you look at your code and wish it was better
- A barrier to code reuse
- Where does it come from?
- Implement fast and easy solutions to meet a deadline
- Junior developers – they do not know better
- Senior developers – they are stuck in their own ways or stop learning
- Passage of time since code was written
- Updates to best practices
- What is best practice today may not be best practice in the future
- Helix:
- A set of patterns for Sitecore development
- Mostly defined for C# backend code opposed to frontend code
- Helps developers know where to put their code
- Target architecture – Dependencies go top to bottom
- Project
- Feature
- Foundation
- Moving from legacy code to Helix
- Not easy if the code did not follow good practices when it was written
- Large scale refactoring is a bad idea
- Better to move one piece at a time
- Move dependencies, create interfaces, setup dependency injection
- Large sections of code may never get refactored
- “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”
- Very hard to regression test an entire application
- Leave code better than you found it
- When working in legacy code, clean up the area of the code you are working in if possible
- You need to test the section that got updated anyhow
Development process:
- Create a component library
- A basic HTML/CSS site that shows off the UI components
- Testable by QA early in the process
- Easier to make changes before renderings are built
- Code Analysis
- Automatic code quality checking
- Helps you find simple errors
- Can check for coding standards
- Can be a waste of time on legacy code if you don’t plan on fixing the errors
- Code Reviews
- Difficult if you have never done them
- Can lead to awkward conversations or hurt feelings
- Goals
- Improve code quality
- Become a better team
- Have more than one set of eyes on the code
- Priorities
- Understanding – Most important
- Correctness
- Design
- Improvements
- Coding style – Least important
- Build Automation
- Build every feature branch
- Build and deploy the develop branch
- Let QA control deployments to QA environments
- All deployments should be push button
- Difficult if you have never done them
That’s a wrap on another session. Be sure to follow all my session reviews and tweet me if you have any questions or want me to write about a particular topic!
