Budget 20% of time for generic sustaining engineering work across the board By “generic sustaining engineering work,” I mean testing, debugging, cleaning up legacy code, migrating language or platform versions, and doing other work that has to happen. If you make this a habit, you can use it to tackle some of the midsize legacy code every quarter and get decent improvements. Cleaning up systems as you go keeps those systems easy to work in, which keeps your teams moving forward on new features. In the worst case, you can use this slack to smooth over unexpected delays in feature development,
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