First Draft Software

Something a lot of software business leaders don’t realise (and more than a few software developers):

Writing software is like writing a book.
Authors never get it right on the first draft (software: first deployment).
And they rarely even get it right on the second draft, and sometimes not even the third.
Some parts of a book can take many drafts to get right before it’s published.

Yet there’s a lot of software that gets released after the first draft and not touched for man years (even in the age of agile).

If a software business is not iterating over its product – i.e. reviewing, refactoring and iterating – then they’re not producing a quality product.
And the benefit of software is that unlike a book, software can be updated (corrections, bug fixes, improvements) after it has been published.

Would I buy a “first draft” book? No.
So why should I accept first draft software products?