Balancing new features and maintenance

Every software service requires maintenance so that it stays in good shape, but don't add evident external value. Maintenance tasks are critical for good operation, though, and can be divided into two categories: regular maintenance and managing technical debt.

Technical debt is the one that will use most of the time and requires further discussion, but before that, let's take a look at regular maintenance.

Regular maintenance

This kind of maintenance comes in the shape of tasks that are inherent to the nature of a software service. By running a service that depends on other components, such as underlying operative systems or the Python interpreter, we need to keep them up to...