Manage Technical Debt

[ccostino]

There are several pieces of general work that we can do for ourselves to help manage our technical debt:

• Remove unused code
• Improve our use of style checks and linters for code formatting and organization
• Improve and maintain our application configuration
• Keep dependencies up-to-date and remove any that are no longer used
• Keep our third party integrations up-to-date (e.g., GitHub Actions)

While these should ideally be ongoing maintenance items that we bake into every development sprint and stay on top of, we have a bit of work ahead of us before we reach that level of operational maturity.

Manage unused code

• API: Use Vulture to identify potentially unused code #1002
• Admin: Use Vulture to identify potentially unused code notifications-admin#1545
• Utils: Deprecate and archive this repository notifications-utils#190
• Investigate the removal of the V2 API #838
• Investigate why /v2 URLs are being called (mostly in the API, but some Admin as well) #955
• Remove letters code #118

Improving use of style checks and linters

TBA

Improve and maintain our application configuration

TBA

Manage dependencies

• Localize the notification_utils repo into the API repo #997
• Localize notifications_utils into the admin repo notifications-admin#1541
• Identify dependencies we can remove #375 - needs to be scoped further
• Upgrade Node.js to the latest stable release notifications-admin#1495
• Upgrade SQLAlchemy to the latest 2.0.x release #825
• Update Flask to 3.0.x along with its related dependencies (API, Admin, and utils) #869
• Final tests for SQLAlchemy 2.0.x upgrade #960
• Update the lodash JS library notifications-admin#1460
• Investigate our use and configuration of gunicorn in the admin site notifications-admin#740

Manage third-party integrations

• Switch from 18F/cg-deploy-action to cloud-gov/cg-cli-tools #599

Keep code up-to-date with language updates

• Make our date/time references timezone aware