From the course: Refactoring with GitHub Copilot

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Pay down technical debt

Pay down technical debt

Refactoring is a scary word to managers. It sounds like labor that has no appreciable improvement to the product. But we know better. One way developers often explain barriers to code is with the phrase technical debt. This Stack Overflow article is a great read, suggesting we stop using that phrase. Referring to brittle or hard-to-change code as technical debt might not be an accurate, but it's also not helpful. After spending time refactoring and fixing, you will have passed the current problem only to uncover the next hurdle. If you're getting pushback from leadership on TDD and refactoring, stop talking about those things in developer language and start talking about them in business language. And start tracking them. In my course on advanced PHP debugging, I suggest a few ways to capture that data. You and your team can keep track of regressions after releases. See if adding tests and incremental refactoring influences the trend. One metric that is used in DevOps is deploy…

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