Embrace technical debt
Jonas Galvez
"The metaphor also explains why it may be sensible to do the quick and dirty
approach. Just as a business incurs some debt to take advantage of a market
opportunity developers may incur technical debt to hit an important deadline."
"This framing takes for granted that the quick and dirty approach will incur
significantly more technical debt than the slow and clean approach. Yet other
agile principles suggest the opposite, as in YAGNI and
DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork. Reconciling these principles
requires a little humility."
"In the end, what mattered wasn’t that we did everything right, but that our
fundamental approach was flexible and resilient. At no point did we stop
everything and do a ground-up rewrite. Instead, we incrementally improved
our process, architecture, and infrastructure, always learning and adjusting.
The blur you see today is the result of the beneficial compounding interest
of that approach applied with discipline over many years."
Amen.
--Jonas Galvez