Technical debt management in Software Engineering - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Technical Debt Management

📖 Scenario: You are part of a software development team working on a project that has accumulated some technical debt. Your team wants to organize and manage this technical debt effectively to improve the code quality and maintainability.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple structured list of technical debt items, categorize them by priority, and create a plan to address them step-by-step.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called technical_debt with exact entries for debt items and their descriptions

Add a variable called priority_levels listing the priority categories

Use a loop with variables item and description to create a new dictionary debt_by_priority grouping items by priority

Add a final step to include a summary string management_plan describing the approach

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Managing technical debt is essential in software projects to keep the codebase healthy and maintainable over time.

💼 Career

Software engineers and project managers use technical debt management to prioritize work and improve software quality.

1

Create the technical debt dictionary

Create a dictionary called technical_debt with these exact entries: 'Legacy code': 'Old code that is hard to maintain', 'Lack of tests': 'Insufficient automated tests', 'Outdated dependencies': 'Libraries that need updating', 'Poor documentation': 'Missing or unclear documentation'.

Software Engineering

# Create the technical_debt dictionary with exact entries
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create a dictionary with the exact keys and values given.

2

Add priority levels list

Create a list called priority_levels with these exact strings in order: 'High', 'Medium', 'Low'.

Software Engineering

technical_debt = {
    'Legacy code': 'Old code that is hard to maintain',
    'Lack of tests': 'Insufficient automated tests',
    'Outdated dependencies': 'Libraries that need updating',
    'Poor documentation': 'Missing or unclear documentation'
}
# Create the priority_levels list with 'High', 'Medium', 'Low'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets [] to create a list with the exact strings in order.

3

Group technical debt by priority

Create an empty dictionary called debt_by_priority. Then use a for loop with variables item and description to iterate over technical_debt.items(). Inside the loop, assign priorities as follows: if item is 'Legacy code' or 'Lack of tests', set priority to 'High'; if item is 'Outdated dependencies', set priority to 'Medium'; otherwise, set priority to 'Low'. Add each item to the list in debt_by_priority under its priority key. Initialize the list if the key does not exist yet.

Software Engineering

technical_debt = {
    'Legacy code': 'Old code that is hard to maintain',
    'Lack of tests': 'Insufficient automated tests',
    'Outdated dependencies': 'Libraries that need updating',
    'Poor documentation': 'Missing or unclear documentation'
}
priority_levels = ['High', 'Medium', 'Low']
# Create debt_by_priority dictionary and group items by priority using a for loop
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary to group items by priority. Check each item and assign priority accordingly. Use if priority not in debt_by_priority to initialize lists.

4

Add a management plan summary

Create a string variable called management_plan with this exact text: 'Focus first on high priority technical debt items, then address medium and low priority items to improve code quality over time.'

Software Engineering

technical_debt = {
    'Legacy code': 'Old code that is hard to maintain',
    'Lack of tests': 'Insufficient automated tests',
    'Outdated dependencies': 'Libraries that need updating',
    'Poor documentation': 'Missing or unclear documentation'
}
priority_levels = ['High', 'Medium', 'Low']
debt_by_priority = {}
for item, description in technical_debt.items():
    if item in ['Legacy code', 'Lack of tests']:
        priority = 'High'
    elif item == 'Outdated dependencies':
        priority = 'Medium'
    else:
        priority = 'Low'
    if priority not in debt_by_priority:
        debt_by_priority[priority] = []
    debt_by_priority[priority].append(item)
# Create the management_plan string with the exact text
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the exact text to the variable management_plan using quotes.