5 Lessons Learned On Technical Debt Day At Gympass

TL.DR

• Delivering everything in a single day has helped us to get rid of daily/new distractions
• Pairing up and working in groups improved speed in problem solving and team integration
• Relaxed and informal breaks helped us to increase focus and motivation
• The product development teams helped us to prioritize and understand the value of each task delivery
• Technical debts tend to always grow. With this initiative, we were able to give more attention to this specific workflow and cease our debts

Intro

Have you ever come across a huge laundry pile and asked yourself: where do I begin, how do I get rid of it all? A task force maybe? Yes, that was exactly our thought when we saw our stack of technical debts that insisted on growing in every retrospective analysis. Since we needed those clothes washed and ready to wear, we decided to come up with a task force and called it TECH-DEBBY-DAY.

The idea came up during a hack day. We thought to ourselves, it works well, why not having a hack day, hands-on mode, for each technical debt task? The process has succeeded in bringing up ideas and solutions, what could go wrong, right?

The dynamics was pretty simple. We selected a technical debt task, paired up, decided what would be done to get it solved in one day, and scheduled which particular day each task would be dealt with. It worked out so well, we agreed to list our top 5 learnt lessons.

One Day-Task Force

One of the most evident benefits, was channelling all of our energy and focus on finishing the task until the end of the day, with no postponing allowed. The planning was very concise and had to be done in a very short period of time, thus productivity techniques like pomodoro*, GTD and Kanbam were our main allies. With no time to spare, the team maintained its focus, since we all wanted the stack of tasks to end.

Team Integration

There is nothing in life so perfect that can’t get better, including a team’s integration. Have you ever heard the term “Friends are made in happiness, but known in times of trouble”? Well, while working closer as a team to solve a technical debt task, we ended up solving other particularities as individuals, like the way we are used to work, and how it affects others. Working together, made us compromise to get to know each other better as human beings and improved our relationships among the team.

A Very Relaxed Day, Regardless The Effort

Breakfast with tea, fruits, and light snacks. Pause for a quick video game match. Unlimited jokes. Relaxing music. This was our day at the war-room which, in this scenario, should have been named as decompression-room instead, since it was a key factor to achieve long focus periods in between pomodoros* and headphones.

Product Team Input

More important than solving technical issues, is engaging the whole team to the project. Why not inviting the product team along? Afterall, they are the ones who can help us to understand the priorities and delivery value of each task, and believe me, they will be glad to do so. At the end of the day, the sparks in their eyes while looking at the results can be seen as a reward, it truly makes it all worth it.

Finally, The End Of Technical Debt Tasks

We used to look at the pile of loose ends that were accumulating and think, “Oh boy, when are we going to revisit those monsters that have been haunting us for days?” and suddenly it was time to face it. We could feel it in the team’s breathe, their ‘eye of the tiger’ faces, their fingers pointing at the keyboards and screens as if they were cannons aiming at the enemy, ready to hear the victory roar at any moment. At last, we saw it with relief, the death of our technical debt -tasks.

While analysing the retrospective of the whole process, we came to the conclusion that our Tech-Debby-Day was not leaving us anytime soon. We’ve decided that it should happen on a monthly basis until it is no longer needed. At last, we would like to leave you with the following thought: why shouldn’t you also give it a try?

Thanks for reading! We have listed below the deliveries made at our latest Tech-Debby-Day:

• A scaffold for automation of new project creations
• Extendable toggle feature for adding new comparative methods
• Tool for project settings by environments
• CI Automate for legacy services tests
• Performance improvement of a query in production
• Reduction of candidates tests queue
• Improved testing unit performance of micro service projects
• In production bug fixes

* The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. The technique uses a timer to break down work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks.