It's product management's job to bridge that gap. Break down and prioritize complex projects into smaller deliverables that keep the business folks happy.

It's better than houses, IMO - no one moves into the bedroom once it's finished while waiting for the kitchen.

is there any evidence the tea app failure was due to AI use?

Different situation. You already had a product that they were quite happy with, and that worked well for them. So they saw change as a problem, not a good thing. They weren't waiting for anything new, or anything to improve, they were happy on their couch and you made them move to redo the upholstery.

> How about the tons of products we don't even see? Those that tried to do it right on the first try, then never delivered anything because there were too slow and expensive.

I would welcome seeing a lesser amount of new crappy products.

That dynamic leads to a spiral of ever crappier software: You need to be first, and quicker than your competitors. If you are first, you do have a huge advantage, because there are no other products and there is no alternative to your crapware. Coming out with a superior product second or third sometimes works, but very often doesn't, you'll be an also-ran with 0.5% market share, if you survive at all. So everyone always tries to be as crappy and as quick as possible, quality be damned. You can always fix it later, or so they say.

But this view excludes the users and the general public: Crapware is usually full of security problems, data leaks, harmful bugs that endanger peoples' data, safety, security and livelihood. Even if the product is actually useful, at first, in the long term the harm might outweigh the good. And overall, by the aforementioned spiral, every product that wins this way damages all other software products by being a bad example.

Therefore I think that software quality needs some standards that programmers should uphold, that legislators should regulate and that auditors should thoroughly check. Of course that isn't a simple proposition...

Exactly. There is a reason for the push. The natural default of many engineers is to "do things properly", which often boils down to trying to guess all kinds of possible future extensions (because we have to get the foundations and the architecture right), then everything becomes abstracted and there's this huge framework that is designed to deal with hypothetical future needs in an elegant and flexible way with best practices etc. etc. And as time passes the navel-gazing nature of the project grows, where you add so much abstraction that you need more stuff to manage the abstraction, generate templates that generate the config file to manage the compilation of the config file generator etc.

Not saying this happens always, but that's what people want to avoid when they say they are okay with a quick hack if it works.

Waterfall certainly has processes for going back and adjusting previous steps after learning things later in the process. The design was updated if something didn’t work out during implementation, and of course implementation was changed after errors was found during testing.

Now that agile practitioners have learned that requirements and upfront design actually is helpful, the only difference seems to be that the loops are tighter. That might not have been possible earlier without proper version control, without automated tests, and the software being delivered on solid media. A tight feedback loop is harder when someone has to travel to your customer and sit down at their machines to do any updates.