Revisiting technical debt with simple expiry annotations

by sam.becker /

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Managing technical debt is important for the health of all software projects. One way to manage certain types of technical debt is to revisit code and decide if it’s still relevant to the project and to potentially remove it. Doing so can reducing complexity and the amount of code developers are required to maintain.

To address this we’ve been experimenting with adding simple annotations to code, which indicate an “expiry”. A nudge to developers to go and reevaluate if some bit of code will still be needed at some point in the future. This can be integrated into CI pipelines to fail builds which have outstanding expiry annotations.

Some scenarios where this has proved to be helpful have been:

  • Removing workarounds in CSS to address bugs in web browsers which have since been fixed.
  • Removing uninstalled modules, which were required only for hook_uninstall.
  • Removing code that exists for features which are gradually being superseded, like an organisation gradually migrating content from nodes into a new custom entity.

Here is an real snippet of code we were able to recently delete from a project, based on a bug which was fixed upstream in Firefox. I don’t believe without an explicit prompt to revisit the code, which was introduced many months earlier, we would have been able to confidently clean this up.


// @expire Jan 2018
// Fix a bug in firefox which causes all form elements to match the exact size
// specified in the "size" or "cols" attribute. Firefox probably will have
// fixed this bug by now. Test it by removing the following code and visiting
// the contact form at a small screen size. If the elements dont overflow the
// viewport, the bug is fixed.
.form-text__manual-size {
  width: 529px;
  @media (max-width: 598px) {
    width: 100%;
  }
}

The code we've integrated into our CI pipeline to check these expiry annotations simply greps the code base for strings matching the expiry pattern for the last n months worth of time:


#!/bin/bash

SEARCH_FORMAT="@expire %s"
DATE_FORMAT="+%b %Y"
DIRS="./app/modules/custom/ ./app/themes/"
SEARCH_LAST_N_MONTHS=4

# Cross-platform date formatting with a month offset.
case `uname` in
  Darwin)
    function date_offset_month() {
      date -v $1m "$DATE_FORMAT";
    }
    ;;
  Linux)
    function date_offset_month() {
      date --d="$1 month" "$DATE_FORMAT"
    }
    ;;
  *)
esac

for i in $(seq 0 $SEARCH_LAST_N_MONTHS); do
    FORMATTED_DATE=$(date_offset_month -$i)
    SEARCH_STRING=$(printf "$SEARCH_FORMAT" "$FORMATTED_DATE")
    echo "Searching codebase for \"$SEARCH_STRING\"."
    grep -rni "$SEARCH_STRING" $DIRS && exit 1
done

exit 0