Balancing short-term delivery with code quality

Agile developers constantly balance delivering quickly and maintaining code quality. While agile values working software, it also emphasizes sustainable development and technical excellence. Too much focus on speed creates technical debt that eventually slows teams down. Too much perfectionism delays value delivery and feedback. Effective teams make this trade-off consciously rather than defaulting to either extreme. For example, a team might decide to take a shortcut to meet an important market deadline, but immediately schedule refactoring work afterward. They might establish "quality gates" that all code must pass, while being flexible about implementation details. They might also create a "technical debt budget" that limits how much cleanup work can accumulate. When quality is treated as a team responsibility, not just a developer concern, teams make better decisions about these trade-offs.