Tech debt items are the second fundamental building block of Stepsize.

They describe the pieces of tech debt in your codebase and helps you assess their respective severity by collecting all the debt reports they have "caused" and comparing the problems caused by one piece of debt with those caused by another.

Debt items vs debt reports


Say you have an outdated data model that is really hard to work with, causes bugs and makes engineers lose time.

The debt item would be: "Data model is outdated".

And you'd link a number of debt reports to it: "This bug was caused by this outdated data model" or "I lost 4 hours shipping this feature because this outdated data model is really hard to work with".

Check out Tech debt reports to learn more about them.

Mental model

Root causes of problems should be captured with debt items.

Symptoms of problems should be captured with debt reports.

How to create debt items

Debt items are scoped to groups, which typically represent domains in your codebase. Check out Tech debt groups. You can create debt items from there.

Customising debt items' description template

Since debt items are typically compared against one another, it's a good idea to describe them following a template.

We provide a default template which you can customise to suit your needs. You'll find the button below the description input field.

Linking a debt report to an item

This can be done in a number of ways, typically from the feed of debt reports.

Viewing reports linked to an item