Pay it Forward
You can pay now or pay later but trust me you’re gonna pay! I’m talking about Technical Debt… Technical Debt like any other Debt has Interest, so you can pay now or pay later but if you pay later it will be much more expensive. See this post on the Increasing cost of Technical Debt for more info.
The short version is defects are said to have a 1x cost at design time but costs increase exponentially as you build, test approaching production. The simple point is that the earlier that we find and resolve issues and defects the less it costs. Anything that we can do simplify or speed up this process of finding and documenting defects reduces our Debt. We want to make a Shift Left in quality by moving quality checks closer to the beginning of the delivery pipeline where defects are cheaper to fix. By creating Test Cases based on the customer requirements and success criteria we can ensure that our tests are mapped to business value. This is no substitute for Unit Tests written at the Function or Method level as used in Unit Testing. Plan for chaos, write test to detect it and buffer team capacity to fix it (more on that in a future post).
