Exposing technical debt before it’s a problem

Writing software all day, you come across opportunities to refactor or eliminate technical debt. But you can’t always take the time to right the wrongs of programmers past and present. So you write yourself a note, or worse, you write a TODO comment.

// TODO: Warning… There be beasties. This loop is cursed! Traverse it at your own peril.

Um, that seems a bit awkward :| Let’s try this instead.

// TODO: Move this data to a vuex store, to reduce complexity and centralize data mutations

I know what your thinking. That’ll never get done. You’ll forget about it once you start working on the next user story. Why? Because all scrum rituals revolve around the scrum board and all projects revolve around the issues list. There’s no step for looking at TODO’s. If you don’t get that TODO into issue tracking or on the scrum board, you’re SOL.

That’s how technical debt is created. Most of us don’t take the time to create that issue. That’s why I created imdone.io. So you don’t even have to think about it. Just create a TODO comment and the issue is created. Delete the TODO comment and the issue is closed.

The best way to use imdone today is in GitHub’s atom editor, but I’m also working on a service from imdone.io that will track your TODO comments as github issues when you push to a github repo.

I hope using imdone gives you the same sense of fulfillment it gives me, knowing that it’s easy expose the work that needs to be done to remove the burden of technical debt.

Let me know what you think of imdone-atom, imdone.io and imdone-cli. I love getting feedback.

Cheers, Jesse