In honour of the 20 year anniversary of the Agile Manifesto, each monthly blog this year will focus on one of the twelve principles.
"Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility."
Much of this principle can be attributed to Extreme Programming (XP) practices.
When we focus on producing good quality code, we set ourselves up for success. However, many teams struggle with this because they feel forced to output software as fast as possible which often requires them to ignore technical excellence and good design.
The underlying truth is that this principle allows you to go faster. And not just a little bit faster, but quite a bit faster. Because many people don't understand the potential accelerated velocity, they treat this principle as a nice-to-have, or 'we'll do it when we have time'.
Built-in quality is a necessity, not a luxury. Delaying this will only cause you re-work later on.