In the case of toy story 2, I think the analogy would be that they ditched the product they were working on to create a different one. Thus making joel's point non relevant there
It wasn't a new product, they kept a lot of the assets (notably the characters and the universe) but rewrote the script extensively and had to scrap a lot of animation.
I don't think an analogy to software rewrite works very well, the domains are so different. For example Joel makes the point that code have a lot of embedded information which you have to rediscover if you rewrite from scratch. This introduces a huge risk and uncertainty.
If you rewrite a movie script halfway during production you have to scrap a lot of work but you don't really loose knowledge, so the risk is more manageable.
I don't think an analogy to software rewrite works very well, the domains are so different. For example Joel makes the point that code have a lot of embedded information which you have to rediscover if you rewrite from scratch. This introduces a huge risk and uncertainty.
If you rewrite a movie script halfway during production you have to scrap a lot of work but you don't really loose knowledge, so the risk is more manageable.