Invisible Technical Debt: Managing TODO Comments

In software development, it is crucial to maintain code cleanliness and quality to ensure that a project remains easily maintainable.

However, in daily work, developers often face the need to solve tasks quickly, leading them to leave comments in the code such as TODO or FIXME for future improvements.

Over time, the project becomes overloaded with unfinished tasks. These comments accumulate and transform into invisible technical debt, which can negatively affect the project.

The Problem with TODO Comments

Initially, such comments serve as reminders of areas that need further work or refactoring. For example, it might be necessary to optimize an algorithm, fix a temporary solution, improve code readability, or replace an outdated API. However, under tight deadlines and shifting priorities, more attention is often given to the "real" tasks in Jira, Trello, or GitHub Issues.

TODO comments can remain in the source code for years. Over time, they tend to be ignored, often due to changing priorities or team composition.

But every such comment is a debt that needs to be repaid. The more debts there are, the harder it becomes to manage technical debt.

So, what problems do TODO comments bring:

• Invisible Technical Debt: Accumulation of TODO comments creates an illusion that the codebase is in order, while in reality, it hides potential problems.
• Decreased Code Quality: Unresolved tasks lead to bugs and difficulties in maintenance.
• Loss of Context: Over time, developers may forget what exactly needed improvement, especially when the team changes.

What Can Be Done?

Technical debt is almost an inevitable part of the development process, but it is important to manage it so that it does not become a serious obstacle. To achieve this, you can conduct a review of comments during code review, integrate tasks from TODO comments into the project management system, and regularly reassess priorities.

Regular refactoring and a conscious attitude towards TODO comments help keep the codebase in a healthy state.

To analyze this problem, I wrote a utility called Todoctor, which helps to examine debts and control their accumulation.

How Does Todoctor Work?

Todoctor is a CLI utility that processes and analyzes TODO comments in JavaScript and TypeScript code, tracks the history of these comments, and generates a report in HTML format.

Based on the collected information, Todoctor generates a graph showing how the number of TODO comments has changed over N months.

This visualization motivates the team to take action, providing specific metrics and allowing progress tracking in reducing technical debt.

In addition, supplementary information is provided:

• The age of the oldest TODO comment
• The total number of TODO comments
• The average age of TODO comments
• The name of the author with the highest number of such comments

Also, there is a sortable list of TODO comments in your project:

To use this tool in your project, simply run the following command in the root of the project:

npx todoctor

After some time, you will receive a generated report on your project.

Conclusion

Technical debt may seem like a minor issue until it starts slowing down development and degrading product quality. TODO comments are often overlooked, but like any debt, they will eventually need to be paid off.

Todoctor: https://github.com/azat-io/todoctor

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