Reading/Web/Debt

Overview

Technical and UX debt is a matter of priority to the reading web team. Here, we are displaying a list of themes of technical and UX debt which we have worked on and plan on working on in the following quarters of 2016/2017 (Q2-Q4). This list will be used to communicate technical and UX debt on a sprint-by-sprint basis within the team, as well as to summarize the goals and initiatives we have taken on tackling debt over time. Below each theme, an example of a task which would belong in each theme is displayed for reference.

UX Debt Themes

Visual Design improvements

• Alignment issues
• paddings / margins
• font sizes

Technical Debt Themes

Performance

• tweaking something to make the site faster

Accessibility

• writing accessible HTML

Security

• addressing code with security issues

team workflows / internal

• improving tools used by the team, e.g. replacing jsduck in favor of jsdoc
• updating tests

Maintainability

• Making code modular

Clean-up

• removing dead code

Improvements such as using new approaches

• templates rather than inline PHP
• upstreaming and using the upstreamed modules rather than modules developed in an extension
• using resource loader image module rather than inlining images in CSS

Developer performance

• a list of articles to test against, etc.

Common Themes

• Accessibility
• Low grade browsers
• Usability