Report technical debt directly from VSCode

This is an early release that has some rough edges and is going to change significantly.

It requires access to the Stepsize private beta to work.

Setting up the extension

• Visit stepsize.com/editor-extensions
• Copy your authentication token
• In VSCode, open the command palette, and search for & select Sign in to Stepsize tech debt extension
• Paste in your authentication token and hit enter

Using the extension to report debt

The main purpose of the extension is to make it very easy for you to point to some code and describe what's wrong with it, as it relates to tech debt.

You can report 4 kinds of things:

• A description of what's wrong with the code
• The amount of time the code made you lose
• A suggestion on how to improve the code
• The fact that the code caused a quality issue

For a piece of code

• Select a piece of code & right click it
• Select Report Technical Debt from the menu (2nd-to-last option)
• Describe what's wrong with the code you selected
• Optionally add more detail such as a suggestion or time lost
• Optionally link your report directly to an issue by assigning it as the root cause

For a file or directory

• Right click the file / directory in the file Explorer
• Select Report Technical Debt from the menu (2nd-to-last option)
• Describe what's wrong with the file / directory
• Optionally add more detail such as a suggestion or time lost
• Optionally link your report directly to an issue by assigning it as the root cause

Using the extension to be aware of debt

Software development requires rich context, and part of this context relates to technical debt – what should you know about this code? Is it a dangerous thing to modify? Why is it the way it is, and is there anything you should be aware of modifying it?

The Stepsize extension decorates your code with exactly this kind of context based on the technical debt you and your team has reported.

Adding Stepsize as a recommended extension

VSCode allows you to recommend certain extensions to your colleagues who work on the same repo as you to standardise the tools you use.

We recommend you add Stepsize as a recommended extension to help your team discover it and easily add it to their workflow – managing tech debt is a team sport!

1. Update your .gitignore file to contain these two lines (and remove .vscode if it's there)

   .vscode/*
   !.vscode/extensions.json
   

   The .vscode directory will be added to your repository, but it will only contain the extensions.json file that we'll create in the next step. Don't worry - your local configuration files will still be ignored by git.

2. Go to .vscode directory (or create one in the root of the project if you don't have it yet) and create a file called extensions.json.

3. Save this snippet in extensions.json:

   {
     "recommendations": ["stepsize.stepsize"]
   }
   

   If you already have recommendations in place, just add "stepsize.stepsize" to the existing list.

4. Commit and push your changes.

Get in touch, we need your feedback

We're keen to hear from you to improve the extension!

• Schedule a 15-30min call with us here
• Request features or vote on requested features here
• Get to know us & have a chat by joining our Spectrum community
• Get fast support here by talking to us via the chat in the bottom right corner

License

For now this extension is released as proprietary software with an end-user license agreement.

It looks a bit scary, but basically it says "this is free beta software, use it at your own risk". It points out that we collect some telemetry data to improve the extension, and that feedback you give us is our intellectual property.