Observations on Product Development: Part 5

1. The Kübler-Ross Model (a.k.a. "The Five Stages of Grief": Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) is also applicable to product development projects that are in trouble.
2. Build servers must have monotonically increasing clocks; otherwise builds using tools like make are not reliably reproducible.
3. Consider completely divorcing your product build system from whatever damn fool build system that generates your root file system; the latter is seldom optimized for the same things as the former should be.
4. If you want to eventually generate revenue, you must first optimize for developer productivity; everything else is negotiable.
5. If you don't believe #4, read your company's financial report and see where most of its money is being spent.
6. Don't build the Taj Mahal on a foundation of sand and loose gravel, no matter what your precious agile methodology says about customer value.
7. It almost never needs to be gold plated.