Have you ever been on a project where, because of the tight schedule or tight budget, the focus was only on delivering business stories? How did that work for you? Did you ever manage to pay all the technical debt incurred? What about the process debt?
I think that in most cases, this is a false economy.ย We’re gaining a small benefit now (maybe not event that), but we’re paying a much larger cost in the future. This is because, as Mike Rother says, a process that does not improve, degrades over time. For example, if you’re not continuously improving the feedback through the deployment pipeline, your 20 minute test suite will grow into an 1 hour test suite. If you’re not constantly fixing brittle tests, people will get used to ignoring them. This is not a people problem. It’s a system problem. It’s much harder to make people do something. It’s easier to put the required controls in the process. As an example, fail the build if the tests take longer than 30 minutes.
