'Technical Debt' in Agile

Here is an interesting article on what is technical debt, a term we frequently use in agile development and club everything related to system and workflow improvement under it.

As per Peter Green, author of this article, Technical debt is the conscious choice to get to market faster by skipping some steps required for long term code sustainability. For example, team discovered an issue during its regular testing before release of that feature but decided to skip that for the cost of reaching out to market early. Something which was not thought of by PdM or poorly written code to save on time or missed out tasks during regular testing are NOT examples of technical debt.

Btw, here’s a video of Ward Cunningham himself explaining the debt metaphor: http://youtu.be/pqeJFYwnkjE,  and some ways in which it has been misunderstood since he coined it, starting at 3:15.

Lean vs Agile vs Lean Startup

Ever since I was introduced to concepts of Lean, Agile and more recently to Lean Startup, I knew these are all related but how exactly wasn't very clear to me. I looked around on web but couldn't get a satisfactory answer. Last month, I had a chance to hear Adobe's agile gurus, Peter Green and Hart Shafer on this topic. While I cannot share the wonderful presentation due to copyright issues here is a very brief gist of it (with my own interpretations and inputs) -

• Agile, Lean and Lean Startup are all related to each other as they talk about responding rapidly to changing environment.
• All of these have distinct principles but they are still related. IMO all of them flow from Deming's Plan-Do-Check-Act model.
• Lean and agile both talk about how to complete work to deliver a product. 
• Lean comes more from manufacturing background and therefore focuses on pull and value stream mapping. 
• Agile comes from software development and therefore talks about team organization which lean does not say anything about. 
• Lean Startup talks more about aspects other than actual product development viz. product ideation, customer discovery and sales. It focuses on customer experimentation
• A combination of all these practices will result in maximum productivity for end-to-end product development.