Your sales and marketing folks say that if you can quickly program that new feature by Friday, they will be able to demo it to a possible new and large client, which could lead to some big sale. What do you do? Lower the amount of quality design work you normally do and make the deadline? Or tell sales and marketing that it isn't possible, since you must keep quality code high? In most cases, we program the feature to hit the deadline.

What then? Most companies then go on to keep shoving more and more features into a system, rarely taking the time to pay down the technical debt. In this talk, I will describe how Industrial Logic adjusts its own quality knob in response to marketing and sales situations. You'll learn when we cut corners and what we do to get back to high quality code.