Erik: Why should a product be treated as an iteration and not an end result?

Chris: Because software doesn’t – it never ends. There’s – and it’s also hard to find the beginning of it too. It’s not this unit of time or effort; it is a continuous process. Software – when software is released to the public, it’s not because it’s bug-free, it’s not because it’s ready, it’s because the project managers have made the decision to abandon more work on it for the current time. Games – there’s an old saying that games aren’t done, they’re abandoned. And you can continuously start working, and then reengineering and redoing a game over and over for infinitely, but you have to stop, and abandon it, and just let it go, and then it’s good, and then you can work on a next iteration or a different project. So software, it’s about, it’s temporal. Where is it at now? Where has it been? It’s not about the unit of time or unit of readiness.

Erik: And that plays into then, just comparing and contrasting, usefulness of continuing to iterate on that product or starting something new.

Chris: Absolutely. Sometimes there’s nothing to do on the products right at the moment, but that can change in a week, or a month, or a year, and it’s all about – it’s a human thing. When the humans working on it are compelled to change it, evolve it, fix it, then it will be changed, evolved, or fixed. There has to be a reason for it, and so if there’s no reason, you have to move onto another product and start something new, but a lot of times you can – there’s plenty to do on something, and you have to kind of make a decision to stop working on this thing and work on something else for a little bit. Let it sit there and collect its problems and then address them later.