I'd leave the short term to short sighted people. In chess, in wars, in business, in software, the world belong to those who see far away.
As Napoleon said: l'intendance suivra, which means that short term and ancillary problems will be solved anyway.
Another way to say this is that if you keep the general long term direction, it will be ok to use dirty hacks to fix in fee minutes the short term problems, you will know how to do it in a way that we'll not hinder the long term path.
But make sure your tools and automation are really in line with the long term direction.
For example, building a chrome plugin to speed manual testing of a web app would be wrong, architecting it to be fully unit testable would be right.
As Napoleon said: l'intendance suivra, which means that short term and ancillary problems will be solved anyway.
Another way to say this is that if you keep the general long term direction, it will be ok to use dirty hacks to fix in fee minutes the short term problems, you will know how to do it in a way that we'll not hinder the long term path.
But make sure your tools and automation are really in line with the long term direction.
For example, building a chrome plugin to speed manual testing of a web app would be wrong, architecting it to be fully unit testable would be right.