> Maintenance doesn't provide immediate economic value
Reading Taleb's Skin in the game helped me articulate it to my team and managers how tech debt is a huge risk and need to find sustainable ways to pay it off. For last few years I have insisted on making sure that every sprint one engineer in dedicated to working on maintenance. Also once every year we do a 1% hackthon (2-3 days) where we work on low priority tickets that have not be worked on for a long time. This stops low priority tasks getting starved out. They impact only a very small number of customers, but added up do end up increasing overall satisfaction of all customers.
Reading Taleb's Skin in the game helped me articulate it to my team and managers how tech debt is a huge risk and need to find sustainable ways to pay it off. For last few years I have insisted on making sure that every sprint one engineer in dedicated to working on maintenance. Also once every year we do a 1% hackthon (2-3 days) where we work on low priority tickets that have not be worked on for a long time. This stops low priority tasks getting starved out. They impact only a very small number of customers, but added up do end up increasing overall satisfaction of all customers.