You always test before you write any code. That's the only way to make sure the code does what it is supposed to do. And that's exactly what good startups do,

You always test before you write any code. That's the only way to make sure the code does what it is supposed to do. And that's exactly what good startups do, they do business tests before they write any code. Don't write code at all unless it's providing value to the customers or helping you learn something you need to know to provide value to the customers. Now that this is taken care of, we come to the problem of the code itself. Each bit of structure you add, whether it's a line of code or a database field on a table, is a bit of infrastructure you may have to maintain, possibly forever. Some folks want to take their eye off the business tests and move directly to system tests, testing and then coding to make sure everybody can easily understand and maintain any code that's written. Most startups fail because they never ever got the business tests working right. They either never got around to creating them and making them pass or they came up with something that worked but were unable to flywheel it or lost the plot somewhere. Some startups have almost-perfect code that nobody wants; that's actually one of the most common way of failing. So the natural state of affairs is to always be experiencing some kind of stress between value discovery and code quality. Personally I believe you solve a lot of this by changing the way you code and the way you look at coding, but there's too much to go into here. The key thing for most programmers to remember is that if you're dying of thirst in a desert, you're not going to care very much if the guy selling glasses of water has glasses that leak or water that's muddy. The value proposition always comes before anything else.