Technical debt is a problem that plagues every software project and technical organization. Leftover tasks, legacy code, open issues - it feels like there is never enough time to visit these things and get them done, when there are so many more important things to do. But letting it pile up can lead to problems - no one likes a messy codebase or security issues! The Lagoon team decided we were going to tackle our tech debt head-on, and we want to share how we’re doing it.

Last year, amazee.io decided to start implementing OKRs (objectives and key results) across the company as a way to help each team focus and measure our progress. Last quarter, the Lagoon team created an objective around eliminating our technical debt, and set a key result to hold a fortnightly “debt smash” session.

Every other week, the team meets for an hour and we focus only on eliminating tech debt and legacy issues. We go through the issue queue, closing out old issues, or getting clarification to see if issues are still valid. We review pull requests and close out old PRs that are no longer valid. We resolve small issues that have been sitting around just waiting for someone to take them on. We find and remove legacy code from the codebase.

The key here isn’t so much what we’re doing, but that we’ve set aside the time, and that we commit to doing the work every time we get together for one of these “debt smash” sessions. It’s surprising what we can accomplish with just two hours a month!

This quarter, we’re continuing to hold our debt smash sessions, but to make sure we’re continuing to make progress, we’re going to create a goal for each session, and hold ourselves accountable for reaching that goal - whether it’s closing a certain amount of issues, or completing a certain task, we want to keep ourselves accountable and keep smashing through our technical debt!