> Software development is always about trade-offs. You can churn out way more features if you don't need to take quality into account. I believe that the curve

> Software development is always about trade-offs. You can churn out way more features if you don't need to take quality into account. I believe that the curves are different. In the short term, just-do-it coding absolutely moves faster. Sustainable practices cost noticeably more visible effort per unit of value created. However the cost of rework eventually catches up with just-do-it and the net value-per-time drops below sustainable practice. I've seen different anecdotal statements of when those lines cross. I see it as happening within a few weeks, I've heard others say 3-4, some say months, up to 1 or 2 years; I expect these variations are due to many factors. In the most recent codebase where I deliberately prototyped without careful practices became bogged down in about 2 weeks. While I do agree with the higher-level discussion that software quality is not the only factor affecting market success, I don't believe that it is always advantageous to sacrifice quality on the theory that it will be faster. Success takes longer than most people expect. Setting up a dichotomy between success-needs-quality and success-needs-speed just leads to a kind of stalemate where artillery barrages of anecdotes are exchanged from entrenched opinions.