Creating Mountains of Technical Debt in Lean Startups
by Joris Poort Lean methodology values employing minimal effort to get to the next milestone. Lean principles have a short-term focus to test hypotheses, which is quite rational considering that once a hypothesis is disproven you haven’t wasted any time in further wasted effort. Customer development methodologies also encourage similar principles, ensuring a deep understanding of the customer and the market before embarking on the development of an expensive product that nobody wants to buy. These lean principles and culture will work great in optimizing the path to get initial traction, but could wreak havoc on further development of the product causing avoidable risks down the line. Creating technical debt through minimizing waste Specifically in software development, lean product development can result in significant technical debt. To be sure, technical debt refers to the costs associated with hasty software development resulting in neglecting architecture,...