Drowning in Tech Debt
What Is Tech Debt?
Technical debt (also known as tech debt or code debt) describes what results when development teams take actions to expedite the delivery of a piece of functionality or a project which later needs to be refactored. In other words, it's the result of prioritizing speedy delivery over perfect code.
Tech Debt Issues
The sites that I am working with are drowning in tech debt (and so are the software engineers). Some of the many problems that exist:
- Relying on an unsupported, outdated and slow view binding software Spark View Engine which was used prior to MVC.
- Over engineered, overly complex, poorly written javascript that is full of business rules that should be relocated to code.
- Too much custom CSS.
- Improperly compressed images.
- Outdated design ideas that led to bad designs and poor overhead
- Relient on VB.NET forms for front end technology which have code behinds that are full of untestable business logic.
This tech debt is causing the sites to perform poorly according to Google's new Core Web Vitals measurements. Which in turn could cause Google to delist the sites. All of this spaghetti code often makes it extremely difficult to add new features and a headache to debug / fix existing code.
What to do?
We have a very small development team so it is extremely hard and only getting harder. I am going to develop a roadmap to help this company get out of their tech debt and put them on a path to be more successful.
Many pages will have to be fully rewritten from scratch and streamlined from business logic. There are many low hanging fruits that can be plucked to help in the short term raise the Lighthouse score. According to Google:
A high Lighthouse score means that your website is fast, accessible, and user-friendly, which can lead to better engagement and more conversions. Secondly, Lighthouse scores are used by search engines like Google to determine where your website ranks in search results.
TL;DR;
Hard to argue with getting deranked on google and common sense changes that can lead to more conversion and engagement.
