It is getting close to the time of the year when the pace of feature-driven change slows down – people want stability when they are on vacation and especially when they’re holding the pager and others are on vacation, and Lord help anyone who negatively affects a Black Friday sale. This is a great time to work on your technical debt. First, you need to identify where it lies!

I expect to spend most of this week identifying areas at work where there are pain points specifically related to tech debt and whether it is better to keep paying the interest or if it is time to pay the whole thing down. I have identified a few candidates related to Puppet already, mostly from lessons learned at PuppetConf.

• Convert tests to use rspec-puppet-facts. A long list of custom facts in each spec test becomes untenable pretty quickly. Preliminary tests show that I need to chose whether tests are based on Windows or Linux, as mixing and matching in the same tests would break most of them, and I’m leaning toward Linux. This does mean that some tests will not use rspec-puppet-facts and will keep their own fact lists.
• Convert params patterns to Data in Modules.
• Try out octocatalog-diff – some unexpected string conversions have been painful before.
• Get a BitBucket-Jenkins-Puppet workflow working and document. This looks promising, does anyone else have workflow guides I can follow?
• Update my Puppet Workflow documentation. This isn’t paying down any actual tech debt, but I think it goes hand-in-hand with the above item and revisiting it should provide some clarity to what we do and maybe highlight some room for improvement.

I’m sure there will be more to come. I will try and blog about my progress throughout the vDM30in30 challenge.