Technical Debt Management.

Taking control of technical debt with SeaLights

Technical Debt
Management.

Taking control of technical debt with SeaLights

What are Technical Debt?

Technical debt is usually the result of a decision made by development teams to take the easy path or skip development best practices, in order to meet a delivery schedule. This leaves behind issues in the codebase that need to be resolved at some point. In other cases, software needs to be updated or maintained, and these changes are delayed to allow for the delivery of new features. This leftover work is a debt that must be paid off at some point in the future.

All software development projects, including Agile projects, accumulate technical debt, and a major challenge of development teams and R&D leadership is to keep technical debt at a level that does not affect the team’s performance on the one hand, and the organization’s long-term goals on the other hand.

What are Technical Debt?

Technical debt is usually the result of a decision made by development teams to take the easy path or skip development best practices, in order to meet a delivery schedule. This leaves behind issues in the codebase that need to be resolved at some point. In other cases, software needs to be updated or maintained, and these changes are delayed to allow for the delivery of new features. This leftover work is a debt that must be paid off at some point in the future.

All software development projects, including Agile projects, accumulate technical debt, and a major challenge of development teams and R&D leadership is to keep technical debt at a level that does not affect the team’s performance on the one hand, and the organization’s long-term goals on the other hand.

How Technical Debt Challenges
in Development Organizations
.

No Time to
“Do Things Right”

Developers prefer releasing well designed, well crafted software solutions. Clean code allows for easy maintenance, extension and modification. In reality, this is often not possible, due to tight schedules, limited resources and a push to meet business objectives. Developers may intentionally generate technical debt to keep to a delivery schedule, or unintentionally create debt during a rush to a release.

Poor Software
Quality

Technical debt is one of the major causes of poor software quality. With the growing complexity of software systems, it’s impossible to test everything. Whether you focus on comprehensive unit test coverage, integration tests between major components, or UI test automation, you are bound to miss some components or integrations which are critical for functionality, stability or performance.

Long-Term Software
Viability

Technical debt negatively impacts the long-term viability of software solutions, resulting in application outages, security vulnerabilities, and increased maintenance costs. Eventually, technical debt will make it very expensive to upgrade or continue supporting the solution. Software products can become a legacy monolith which developers are afraid to touch or modify because any change can have unexpected results.

How Technical Debt Challenges
in Development Organizations
.

No Time to
“Do Things Right”

Developers prefer releasing well designed, well crafted software solutions. Clean code allows for easy maintenance, extension and modification. In reality, this is often not possible, due to tight schedules, limited resources and a push to meet business objectives. Developers may intentionally generate technical debt to keep to a delivery schedule, or unintentionally create debt during a rush to a release.

Poor Software
Quality

Technical debt is one of the major causes of poor software quality. With the growing complexity of software systems, it’s impossible to test everything. Whether you focus on comprehensive unit test coverage, integration tests between major components, or UI test automation, you are bound to miss some components or integrations which are critical for functionality, stability or performance.

Long-Term Software
Viability

Technical debt negatively impacts the long-term viability of software solutions, resulting in application outages, security vulnerabilities, and increased maintenance costs. Eventually, technical debt will make it very expensive to upgrade or continue supporting the solution. Software products can become a legacy monolith which developers are afraid to touch or modify because any change can have unexpected results.

The Sealights Platform

Taking Control Over Technical Debt

SeaLights is a Quality Intelligence Platform that analyzes data from tests, builds and production deployment, and provides a clear visualization of quality risks, known as “test gaps”. These are areas of your software which have recently changed, are used in production, but are not adequately tested.

At SeaLights, we believe that low-risk technical debt is actually a good thing since it lets you increase velocity. Developing and maintaining integration and end-to-end tests is very time-consuming. Teams who try to test everything will drastically slow down their velocity, and in the end, accumulate more technical debt and more test gaps.

The key to success is to focus test efforts on high-risk areas of your software. This requires information and metrics that can help you identify high-risk efforts and focus on them during sprint planning. SeaLights provides that information in a convenient and automated manner.

The Sealights Platform

Taking Control Over Technical Debt

SeaLights is a Quality Intelligence Platform that analyzes data from tests, builds and production deployment, and provides a clear visualization of quality risks, known as “test gaps”. These are areas of your software which have recently changed, are used in production, but are not adequately tested.

At SeaLights, we believe that low-risk technical debt is actually a good thing since it lets you increase velocity. Developing and maintaining integration and end-to-end tests is very time-consuming. Teams who try to test everything will drastically slow down their velocity, and in the end, accumulate more technical debt and more test gaps.

The key to success is to focus test efforts on high-risk areas of your software. This requires information and metrics that can help you identify high-risk efforts and focus on them during sprint planning. SeaLights provides that information in a convenient and automated manner.

How Software Quality Intelligence
Can Help Manage Technical Debt

Ideally, developers and their managers want to allocate development resources towards new functionality that benefits users and enhances revenue. But in reality, developers spend a lot of time on maintenance and bug fixing. Optimizing this activity is key to making development organizations more effective.

Test Impact Analysis.

Too many redundant tests are created and kept, taking up engineering resources. SeaLights reduces test creation by isolated areas where code was recently modified or executed in production but did not undergo regression testing. Team members and managers can use smart data to identify gaps and to develop new tests in sprints to come.

Untested code in production results in failures, poor user experience, and time wasted on carrying out hotfixes. SeaLights analyzes modifications to your code and lets you know whenever an untested code change has gone through production unnoticed. Prevent risky code prior to shipment and address critical issues before they affect your users.

Manual Test Coverage.

Manual testing is concurrent learning, test design, and test implementation of critical components of the application. It provides quick feedback and reveals critical bugs in newly released features. These tests are manual, so they have a longer test execution time, and there are more costs involved. Thus, it is essential to minimize overlap with different kinds of tests. Achieve visibility into which areas of code are being tested with exploratory and manual tests, in order to enhance team success and productivity.

Functional Test Coverage.

Applications are developed with several builds each made up of distinctive code changes. This climate of incremental code changes, particularly functional, API and regression testing CI/CD pipelines, demand straight forward functional test code coverage to facilitate visibility and efficient feedback loops.

How Software Quality Intelligence
Can Help Manage Technical Debt

Ideally, developers and their managers want to allocate development resources towards new functionality that benefits users and enhances revenue. But in reality, developers spend a lot of time on maintenance and bug fixing. Optimizing this activity is key to making development organizations more effective.

Test Impact Analysis.

Too many redundant tests are created and kept, taking up engineering resources. SeaLights reduces test creation by isolated areas where code was recently modified or executed in production but did not undergo regression testing. Team members and managers can use smart data to identify gaps and to develop new tests in sprints to come.

Untested code in production results in failures, poor user experience, and time wasted on carrying out hotfixes. SeaLights analyzes modifications to your code and lets you know whenever an untested code change has gone through production unnoticed. Prevent risky code prior to shipment and address critical issues before they affect your users.

Manual Test Coverage.

Manual testing is concurrent learning, test design, and test implementation of critical components of the application. It provides quick feedback and reveals critical bugs in newly released features. These tests are manual, so they have a longer test execution time, and there are more costs involved. Thus, it is essential to minimize overlap with different kinds of tests. Achieve visibility into which areas of code are being tested with exploratory and manual tests, in order to enhance team success and productivity.

Functional Test Coverage.

Applications are developed with several builds each made up of distinctive code changes. This climate of incremental code changes, particularly functional, API and regression testing CI/CD pipelines, demand straight forward functional test code coverage to facilitate visibility and efficient feedback loops.

Test Coverage Analysis.

SeaLights integrates with all your testing tools, monitors test execution and calculates a holistic test coverage score across all test types. Holistic test coverage reveals your technical debt. If 60% of your software is tested, the other 40% is untested and probably contains unknown problems – the missing tests and unknown problems represent your technical debt.

Recently Changed Code Analysis.

Recently changed code is much riskier than code that has been in your system for ages and is frequently executed by users. SeaLights can monitor and analyze untested code changes in a specific build, across a period of time, or comparing two or more builds. Untested code changes are a high-risk portion of your technical debt which should receive high priority.

Frequently Used Code Areas.

The SeaLights production listener monitors real user data coming from production, and tells you which methods in your codebase are actually in use. To prioritize and determine the importance of different code areas, Sealights applies business criticality weights to different code areas. It visualizes untested, frequently used code areas and these represent high-risk technical debt.

Leveraging Quality Intelligence
to View Real Quality Metrics

SeaLights can help you visualize your test gaps. This gives you a picture of your technical debt and helps you identify high risk areas within your debt.

The most powerful use of this data is in a sprint planning session:



  • Sprint planning is the best time to raise the technical debt problem



  • Use test gaps data to make the development team and stakeholders aware of the current status of technical debt



  • Use the data to make informed decisions

Sprint planning including test gaps data from SeaLights can help:



  • Increase software quality – Focus testing efforts to reduce your high-risk technical debt, improving software stability, functionality and performance.



  • Increase development velocity – test gap analytics is a safety net you can trust to find a major version regression. Having a safety net lets you increase velocity with confidence, knowing that you can identify, stop and fix any critical quality issue.

Identifying
Quality Risks.

Quality risks are recent code changes that have not been tested. SeaLights can monitor and analyze data from all test frameworks and recommend where to add tests that will have the biggest impact on quality.

Identifying
Redundant Tests.

SeaLights identifies redundant testing activity that does not need to be included in the sprint. Redundant tests cover features that haven’t recently changed or are not actively used.

Support Release Decisions with Data.

SeaLights identifies features that are covered by tests at all levels (unit tests, UI tests, integration tests and end-to-end tests) and features that are most used in production, thus helping teams decide which build to release to production.

Leveraging Quality Intelligence for
Effective Sprints and Sprint Plans

SeaLights, a Quality Intelligence Platform used by leading software teams, provides a Test Gap Analysis Report that can fill in missing information about product quality. It is possibly the best way to plan an effective sprint that can balance between new features and important quality issues.

By leveraging this report, teams can focus on developing integration tests only in the most important parts of the product, and set smarter build-breaking criteria, significantly increasing sprint productivity.

The Test Gap Analysis Report helps teams focus their testing efforts, by highlighting high-risk code areas:



  • Recent code changes



  • Code that is not tested by any part of the product’s test suite (unit tests, integration tests, UI automation tests, etc)



  • The most important code areas

Sprint planning including test gaps data from SeaLights can help:



  • Increase software quality – Focus testing efforts to reduce your high-risk technical debt, improving software stability, functionality and performance.



  • Increase development velocity – test gap analytics is a safety net you can trust to find a major version regression. Having a safety net lets you increase velocity with confidence, knowing that you can identify, stop and fix any critical quality issue.

Learn More About Technical Debt Management, Read our White Paper

How to Use Analytics to Eliminate the Risk of Your Team’s Technical Debt

All software development projects, especially those that are executed using Agile practices, will result in technical debt – the major challenge is the creation and implementation of an efficient management strategy to keep technical debt at a level that does not affect performance and long-term goals of your team.
In this white paper you’ll learn:



  • The causes and consequences of technical debt



  • The impact of technical debt on the productivity of your development team (and business relationship with clients)



  • How you can leverage test gap analytics to reduce the risk associated with technical debt.

By submitting this form I agree that SeaLights may process my data in the manner described in SeaLights Privacy Policy.

How to Use Analytics to Eliminate the Risk of Your Team’s Technical Debt

Quality: The Missing Metric For Software Development Managers

All software development projects, especially those that are executed using Agile practices, will result in technical debt – the major challenge is the creation and implementation of an efficient management strategy to keep technical debt at a level that does not affect performance and long-term goals of your team
In this white paper you’ll learn:



  • The causes and consequences of technical debt



  • The impact of technical debt on the productivity of your development team (and business relationship with clients)



  • How you can leverage test gap analytics to reduce the risk associated with technical debt.

By submitting this form I agree that SeaLights may process my data in the manner described in SeaLights Privacy Policy.