Managing Technical Debt

Paul Dyson in Technical Debt and the Lean Startup (via @KentBeck):

In a startup, technical debt is something to be managed, not minimised. We make sure we understand how much debt we have and which bits of the system it affects. We make sure we have the ability to pay down that debt as and when we need to. And, we make sure we work the time and money required to pay down the debt into any timescales or budgets we agree.

The whole piece is great. Worth the read. (Even all these years later!) If I would change anything, I might apply the same thinking more broadly: “Technical debt is something to be managed, not minimised.”