How one small change allowed Terakeet to fix 70% of their technical debt

‍The Client:

Terakeet is a managed services company with over 400 employees that helps Fortune 1000 organizations grow revenue and protect their brand. Breno Da Mata is a Senior Software Engineer at Terakeet.

The Challenge:

Terakeet was struggling to get crucial refactoring and maintenance tasks done. The team would add maintenance issues to Jira, but they were always deprioritised in favour of building new features.

The issues in Jira lacked crucial details because the engineers didn’t have enough time to explain the problem in detail or copy-paste relevant snippets of code.

The problem was made worse by the fact that logging technical issues in Jira required a significant amount of context switching, which meant that most engineers decided to skip it.

This meant that technical issues went unsolved and the team struggled to scope and prioritise sprints accurately due to technical debt.

The Solution:

Breno looked for a solution and found an article that mentioned Stepsize. He installed the extension and was amazed by the fact that he could link scattered code into one coherent issue. 

This was a big deal, as Stepsize could make obscure issues in the Jira backlog a thing of the past. He brought up Stepsize in a dev meeting and his team was just as excited as he was. They quickly started to track issues from their editors while coding.

With issues now linked to code, Stepsize annotations made them visible in the codebase. This gave the team extra context so they could avoid making issues worse and, in some cases, fix issues as they encountered them.

Thanks to the Jira integration, the enriched issues were seamlessly added to and synced with Jira, to ensure maximum visibility to all stakeholders. The team was finally able to discuss and accurately prioritise technical issues.

Results:

• More than 70% of the issues created in Stepsize have been resolved, including all of the critical issues 
• Engineers are tracking more technical issues than ever
• The team is better able to scope and prioritise sprints and tech debt no longer turns into scope creep. 
• Productivity has significantly increased due to less context switching
• Technical issues created in Stepsize are now discussed and prioritised in a regular meeting

“Linking maintenance issues to code was exactly what we were looking for - we’ve now fixed 70% of our technical issues.
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Knowing that we can rely on Stepsize for tech debt gives us immense peace of mind!” Breno da Mata, Senior Software Developer at Terakeet