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  • This is another big friction to find. Having to say to customer - that we are now building the same thing - of features which are nothing new, after the first version is handed over! How often, and frequently (if ever) can you afford to tell this to customer? or how do you even explain? Commented Nov 12, 2011 at 9:46
  • You have two basic options, either first you simply tell the simple truth - that although what you have works its a mess and it needs to be tidied up to move forward or second that you say that you are building infrastructure to support the ongoing development (which is no less true but is spun so as to be a bit more positive). You can wrap both of these up by saying that in order to deliver the functionality we incurred a technical debt that now needs to be repaid. Commented Nov 12, 2011 at 11:27
  • @Dipan Mehta: Well, suppose a customer wants a two-storey house. You design it and deliver it. Then they want to have four additional storeys. You say, well, I have to spend this time just to make the present building more robust so that it will hold four additional storeys. So I do not think this should be a problem for the customer if the original plan only included two storeys. If six storeys were planned from the very beginning then, yes, it could be a problem to tell the customer. Commented Nov 12, 2011 at 20:39
  • @DipanMehta We're also a bit lucky in that the customers don't necessarily know about this project. It's an upgrade to a product they currently use, with a semi-vague completion date of around the end of this year. So they don't even need to know about a delay for refactoring ;) (The manager handling most of the design decisions is in-house) Commented Nov 12, 2011 at 21:08