Initial planning is hard, especially when working out scope with other parties. Starting the code is hard, you either have to choose to be very careful in your

Initial planning is hard, especially when working out scope with other parties. Starting the code is hard, you either have to choose to be very careful in your original design or knowingly forfeit the code to future rewrites, both choices induce a certain amount of paralysis. Then things get easy. Welcome to the flow inducing fun part. Then the project is 95% done but you know massive amounts of effort will need to be expended buttoning this up. Knowing the abysmal ROI on this stage of the project tends to demotivate a lot of programmers. Its also the part of the project when most of the fun problems have been solved which demotivates even more programmers. This is where you identify who the finishers are (I'm not one) and man is it nice to have some finishers on your team, regardless of how little weight they carry through the first 3 phases. I really only have experience with larger applications. In the few small projects I've worked on the first two phases were virtually non-existent since I, by default, have no problem throwing away something small. Fortunately I really enjoy the first 3 phases. A lot of developers only like one or two... Welcome to the not so rosy world of getting things done.