At the SDTConf, we had an interesting discussion on how to deal with technical debt. The group agreed on the following suggestions:

• C3: Coverage, Complexity & Churn – Instead of looking at each of these parameters in isolation, we generate C3 graph using a TreeMap and use the cumulative graph to see red spots in the product. Esp. helpful to quickly raise awareness.
   
• Slack: Every team members gets a 10-20% time every iteration to invest on things that hurt them.
• Scratch your Personal Itch day: Every iteration each team members gets 1 day to fix unplanned issues on the project
• Visitor from Hell: Every month have one person from other team visit you and give you feedback on various aspect of the team. Its up to the team to address these issues or not. But certainly can be used to pitch to the management for additional time to work on these issue.
• Code Walk Throughs: Every time a team member (or pair) implements something important, they give a code walk through or a demo to the rest of the team. This usually ensures team members don’t have crappy things when they give a demo.

Check out the project rescue report, if you would like to see some examples of how we’ve used C3.

When you smell complexity and lack of clarity in the air, look around, you’ll find your code swimming in a (smelly) soup of primitives (low level data-types, functions and language components). Unable to bare the stink, your code is screaming and screeching, asking you to rescue it.

This is my friend, primitive obsession, the stinkiest code smell. You can rescue your code (yes we can) by creating higher level abstractions (functions, data types, objects) and giving some sense to this anarchy.

Primitive Obsession is about lack of abstractions. In the OO world, Methods, Objects, Packages/Namespaces are ways of creating abstraction. Similarly functions, procedures, modules, etc are also valid ways of creating abstractions.

Adding more objects does not always lead to better abstraction. Sometimes removing objects is more useful.

There are many different refactorings that can be used as a remedies:

• Extract Class
• Replace Data Value with Object
• Replace Type Code with Class
• Introduce Parameter Object
• Replace Array with Object

One of my favorite example of Primitive Obsession (before and after).