
Technical Debt and the Lean Startup  - DanielRibeiro
http://pauldyson.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/technical-debt-and-the-lean-startup/
======
DanielBMarkham
Technical debt is the latent cost of fixing quality problems you incur because
you cut corners. Instead of the "cost" of the debt staying the same, it
actually grows over time. The longer you leave your technical debt, the bigger
pain it will be to fix.

But there's an underlying assumption: technical debt cannot have any value at
all unless the code itself has value. In a business setting, you code
something, the Product Owner approves it, it starts making money for the
business. It has value.

In a startup scenario, the code you write only has about a 5% chance of ever
being worth _anything at all_.

Whether or not you want to be a craftsman or a businessman is left as an
exercise to the reader. But my advice is always do the math. There's a lot of
solid code out there that isn't worth jack shit -- and a lot of proud
programmers who will tell you how awesome their code is.

100% of 0 is still 0.

As a side note, I'm always amazed at the stories of technical debt where a
team hacks something butt-ugly, then gets a million users, then the whole
thing is a piece of shit. When practitioners talk about this, it's almost like
the moral is how bad hacking and bad coding is. They completely miss the point
that _getting the million users here is the significant event, not the coding
style_. You get a million users, you can complain about all kinds of things.
Trust me. You'll work it out. Let some other guy write the book about what
fools you were. You have the million customers. He doesn't.

Note that I'm not saying to code like crap. I'm just saying that everything
you do in a startup -- programming, marketing, sales, accounting, etc -- has
to be measured in terms of gaining and keeping customers. You have to do the
math for your particular situation and figure out where the trade-off is
(insert long discussion about how important MVP is here) Pragmatism always.
Thinking in absolutes will kill you every time.

~~~
r00fus
Like some might say: "it's a nice problem to have"... some of us are working
night an day towards a happy future dilemma of paying technical debt against a
valuable product

