Quotes About Iteration

Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.

One of the reasons microcomputers progressed so fast is people are willing to accept crashes. It's faster to build something and try it, even if it means you'll have to rebuild later... If you spent too much time building and massaging one vehicle, you don't learn anything.

There has to be a willingness to constantly accept critical feedback and rapidly iterate to make things better.

The faster you can get your ideas in contact with the real world, the faster you can discover what is broken with your idea.

Agile is simple—it just isn't easy.

Great software today is often preferable to perfect software tomorrow. If you give your users something to play with early, their feedback will often lead you to a better eventual solution

Always take small, deliberate steps, checking for feedback and adjusting before proceeding

Distrust environments where requirements are gathered, specifications are written, and then coding starts, all in isolation.

Pragmatic Programmers, however, tend to prefer using tracer bullets.

Once they've agreed to the layout, you might throw it away and recode

Well, software doesn't quite work that way. Rather than construction, software is more like gardening—it is more organic than concrete. You plant many things in a garden according to an initial plan and conditions. Some thrive, others are destined to end up as compost.

The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

Sometimes I do that quite a lot, go back and forth a lot between ideas. Try things out.

No reader wants to sit through the same scene four times in a row, unless they're radically different.

I would say, as an entrepreneur everything you do - every action you take in product development, in marketing, every conversation you have, everything you do - is an experiment. If you can conceptualize your work not as building features, not as launching campaigns, but as running experiments, you can get radically more done with less effort.

We built 'Jade Empire,' then we built 'Mass Effect,' then we built 'Dragon Age.' With those last two, when you're dealing with two big ideas that are on their third iterations, you develop some strategies for managing your lore, or you drown!

So, it's a very, you know - maybe we're wrong in - you know, we go around thinking the innovator is the person who's first to kind of conceive of something. And maybe the innovation process continues down the line to the second and the third and the fourth entrant into a field.

Ironically, the original Detroit Stock Exchange once sat less than a thousand feet from StockX headquarters here in downtown Detroit. It is only fitting that we are going to build the next iteration of the world's most efficient market invention almost in the same spot.

Write the tests first, or second, or third. But write the darned tests.

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.

To do something right it must be done twice. The first time instructs the second.

It is always possible to do a thing better the second time.

All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works.

Ship your work. It's good enough. Then, make it better.