The conventional wisdom in engineering is that you have to make a trade-off between quality and speed. I believe that this is mistaken.
The point of solving technical debt is to improve maintainability and performance – so how could this be so diametrically opposed to speed? If you’re a high-performing team, quality and speed are fundamentally the same goal. It is impossible to sustain high performance in the long-term without a high-quality system to work in, and it is difficult to make the case for investing in quality to the stakeholders of teams that aren’t delivering business value.
How did we end up believing in this trade-off?
Most people in technology will have seen some variant of this diagram, which aligns with the argument that you can have any two of speed, quality, and cost.
