Comment by titzer

> 3. Bias towards action. Ship. You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one.

> First do it, then do it right, then do it better. Get the ugly prototype in front of users. Write the messy first draft of the design doc. Ship the MVP that embarrasses you slightly. You’ll learn more from one week of real feedback than a month of theoretical debate.

> Momentum creates clarity. Analysis paralysis creates nothing.

I've met Addy and I'll be generous, but strong disagree here, and this really shows a huge blind spot in how software is being developed today that hurts everyone.

There aren't two extremes between "theoretical debate" and just shipping the first crap you can slap together. Software engineering will never become a real discipline when industry keeps ignoring the lessons of every other field of engineering: gather some requirements first.

Want to know what users want? How about asking them? What about doing some research on what tools they are using now (or not) and finding out what's wrong with them. What about doing a user study? What about analyzing competing and previous products?

How about then drawing up a list of things that say what the thing will do? You can keep the list short, sure. Build a prototype (maybe for internal use)? Sure. No need to have every piece of functionality there.

But there's an enormous blind spot here I'd be remiss to point out. Back in the shrink-wrapped software days, back when products took months and sometimes years to develop, man, people really planned out what they were going to build! And I'm not just romanticizing that era--there was a lot that could go wrong, and many misses--but tons of software developed in that manner sticks with us today, not just the designs and usage patterns, but big chunks of the code too. It's not all legacy cruft; people actually thought about what they wanted to build, and then laboriously built and tested it--with crappier tools, longer build times, and many disadvantages like huge teams, crappier communication, and a whole lot less computational power.

There are other things in this list that are good advice, but I felt like this cannot possibly be the whole truth to 14 years of experience. In other words, please don't just ship your crap to us the first time it functions.