In Agile design, teams work in short sprints and prioritise the most important features to be developed first. Value-based prioritisation allows startups to get a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) to market quickly and start gathering feedback from customers.
Additionally, and by definition, Agile design encourages safe-to-fail experimentation early on in the product’s lifecycle, giving the designer quick feedback and, more importantly, options by preventing developers from gambling the startup’s success on a single specific design. This optionality allows startups to quickly pivot or scale if necessary, which is especially important in a competitive landscape.
In the meantime, it is OK to zigzag your way to success by trying simultaneously to keep technical debt under control while also not missing out on reaching your customer base as quickly as possible.
Architectural debt is the cost of maintaining and updating a software system due to its design or architecture.
It can occur:
- When a system is initially designed and implemented in a rush or with little foresight, leading to problems that become more difficult and expensive to fix as the system grows and evolves.
- When a system is continually modified to meet changing requirements without considering the long-term impact on the overall design.
Managing architectural debt is essential to software development and maintenance, as it can significantly impact a system’s overall cost and quality.
Agile design methodologies can lead to the accumulation of architectural debt, especially if the focus is primarily on delivering new features and functionality in short sprints without sufficient attention to the long-term design and maintainability of the system.
Agile development prioritises flexibility and adaptability, which can make it more challenging to maintain a consistent and coherent architecture over time. However, it is not inherent in Agile development, and several ways exist to mitigate this risk.
Modularity, decoupling, cohesion, and a hierarchical structure are key principles that can help reduce architectural debt in Agile design by making the system more flexible and adaptable.
- Modularity breaks a system into smaller, independent units or modules with well-defined interfaces.
- Decoupling refers to minimising dependencies between different parts of the system.
- Cohesion refers to the degree to which the elements within a module or component work together to perform a single, well-defined function.
- A hierarchical structure allows for a clear separation of concerns and a logical system organisation.
Together, these principles can make it easier to understand, test, and maintain the system and make changes or add new features without affecting the entire system. It also helps to reduce complexity, making the system more manageable and less error-prone.