[weego]

Again that isn't customer facing value. Users do not care about the costs of your business, I cannot understand how so many developers don't seem to understand the basic premise of b2c relationships. At best it's the proposition of future benefits and those benefits are all to the company not the customer.

[viklove]

> Again that isn't customer facing value.

It absolutely is customer facing value. If shipping this feature 2 weeks later means you can ship the next 10 features in 6 months, and the alternative is shipping this feature today but with so much tech debt that you ship the next 10 features in 12 months, then that is value the customer will see.

Similarly, if your code is so shitty that you're adding bugs to the backlog faster than you're able to fix them, that's a negative for the customer. If instead you spend 2 weeks refactoring so that your bugs+ rate is lower than your bugs- rate, that's customer value right there!

I cannot understand how you don't seem to understand this basic premise of a b2c relationship. Users don't just care about the features they have today, and if your competitor gets to market slower than you but has twice the features a year or two later (due to less tech debt), you're gonna be left in the dust.

[onion2k]

I think there's a little confusion around what the 'customer' is here. You seem to believe the customer is the end user. I think of the customer as the person paying for the software. When someone buys some software they usually want it to be reasonably well written, especially if they understand the development process. If you're supplying software to a customer who understands the development process well you'll often find they're more than happy to pay for additional time to do things like refactoring, testing, documentation, etc. The really good customers insist on it and will stop buying from you if you don't include it in the cost.

[guitarbill]

if there's a feature i want as a customer, i do care if i can get that in two months vs six months vs a year. i also care that it's stable.

reputation and trust are hard to measure, and the effect is delayed. unless you have the killer app or feature, with the internet now, word will get out. many a company has tanked their reputation.

iteration speed also makes you vulnerable to be leapfrogged. Azure vs AWS seems to me to be this. a lot of Azure stuff is great now, some of that is hindsight, but real innovation at AWS is also rare. their developer tools, aka code*, are completely underwhelming. as is cloudwatch. ec2, s3, dynamo, and general lock-in are just enough to keep a lot of people.... for now.

[jariel]

If refactoring improves quality and security, that's value and 'it's a feature'. Just not a shiny one.