Technical debt–the ongoing and future costs associated with failing to follow best development practices–should be avoided in the first place. However, we build (or sometimes inherit) sites whose deficiencies make them costly and time-consuming to update and maintain. If we as development teams can reduce the technical debt in existing website projects, we can make it easier to fine-tune sites to meet clients’ needs. This means ongoing development, regular maintenance, and client relations all run more smoothly.

A developer or team that’s in regular contact with a client’s site is in an ideal position to understand both what’s wrong from an implementation point of view, and how to fix it. With a slight change of focus, scheduled maintenance time can be used to document and eliminate existing technical deficiencies and to develop site-specific policies to prevent the introduction of new ones.

The first part of the talk will discuss the idea of a ‘maintenance policy’, that is, a way of defining the goals of ongoing maintenance such that technical debt is gradually reduced (or at least not inadvertently increased). The second part of the talk will discuss concrete strategies that developers and themers can use in the service of such a policy.

On the way, we will touch on:

• technical debt
• maintenance policies
• eliminating custom code
• improving custom code reusability
• code organization
• source control
• documentation
• upgrade-proofing (Drupal 8+)
• useful tools
• process flaws

Examples will generally refer to the theme (usually the greatest source in Drupal sites of both custom code and technical debt) but will also consider Views, Features and other exportables, custom modules and third-party libraries.