3 ms·

Take two nominally identical physical products (from IKEA, for example), one that’s on the shelves today and the other produced several years ago. There’ll be

• dragonwriter 7y ago
  > as a community, we’re missing the knowledge of how to take a proven prototype and continue improving the quality rather than bolting on questionable new features. No, we aren't. We know how to do that, and can do it when we want to. In software dev we rarely want to, because (loaded use of the qualifier “questionable” aside) product teams tend to perceive (not entirely inaccurately, though sometimes the particulars are in error) market demand for additional features. (Also, what physical products are very often optimizing is unit production cost for equivalent products, not quality. But software already has an essentially zero unit cost, so there's essentially no gains to be had optimizing that.)