I tend to agree with this. I do think that this article (as with most) brushes far too easily over the tension between tech debt and new features.
It's not uncommon to have a product person (or even team) that spend tons of time doing analysis to find high-value features. When they show up with some slick Powerpoint/Excel thing that says "If we build this feature we make $BIGNUM", it's extremely difficult for some dev (or dev manager) to come up with an effective counterargument for working on tech debt. Partially because it's not their main job, and partially because quantifying the impact of tech debt is extremely difficult. And it's very easy for that to happen every single planning cycle, even while everyone makes appropriate noises about tech debt being super important and we're totally gonna address that but we just can't justify not going for that $BIGNUM cash first!
I wish I had a solution for that - I don't. If anybody else does I'd love to hear it. :)
It's not uncommon to have a product person (or even team) that spend tons of time doing analysis to find high-value features. When they show up with some slick Powerpoint/Excel thing that says "If we build this feature we make $BIGNUM", it's extremely difficult for some dev (or dev manager) to come up with an effective counterargument for working on tech debt. Partially because it's not their main job, and partially because quantifying the impact of tech debt is extremely difficult. And it's very easy for that to happen every single planning cycle, even while everyone makes appropriate noises about tech debt being super important and we're totally gonna address that but we just can't justify not going for that $BIGNUM cash first!
I wish I had a solution for that - I don't. If anybody else does I'd love to hear it. :)