减少技术债务的系统性方法

While technical debt is a recurring issue in software engineering, the case of the Merchant Orders team within Zalando Direct was a an outlier as, due to a lack of a clearly defined process, technical debt more or less only ever accumulated. When I joined this team in autumn 2020 as its new engineering lead, the technical debt backlog had entries dating back to 2018. In this article, I describe the process we set up in Q1/2021 in order to regain control of our technical debt. While the situation in your own team may not be quite as dire, you may nonetheless find some aspects of this blog post useful to adopt. Our backlog of technical debt tickets used to be in excess of 70, with no end in sight. With the adoption of the methodology described in this article, we have already shipped more than ten features or improvements over the course of eight weeks, i.e. four sprints. For the first time in three years, i.e. ever since my team started tracking technical debt, we are reducing it.

虽然技术债务是软件工程中经常出现的问题，但Zalando Direct内部的商家订单团队的情况是一个例外，因为由于缺乏明确定义的流程，技术债务或多或少只是积累。当我在2020年秋天作为新的工程负责人加入这个团队时，技术债务的积压项目可以追溯到2018年。在这篇文章中，我描述了我们在2021年第一季度建立的流程，以便重新控制我们的技术债务。虽然你自己团队的情况可能没有那么糟糕，但你可能还是会发现这篇博文的某些方面对你有用。我们积压的技术债务票据曾经超过70张，而且看不到尽头。在采用本文所述的方法后，我们已经在八周内，即四个冲刺期间交付了十多个功能或改进。三年来，也就是自从我的团队开始跟踪技术债务以来，我们第一次在减少技术债务。

This article is written from a managerial perspective and has Engineers and Engineering Managers as its target audience, though I hope that engineers of all levels find value in this article. Furthermore, I can only encourage any software engineer reading this article to approach their lead if ever-growing technical debt is an issue in their team. There is a non-zero chance that they will appreciate you raising the issue, considering that all of us are aware that technical debt is a serious problem. If you do not pay it down, you will get more technical debt on top for free, until your only option is a complete rewrite. This is quite similar to compound interest driving debtors into bankruptcy in the real world. Obviously, w...