[dmurray]

> The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers. Seen this way, the answer is much clearer.

It's not that clear! Perhaps you will only learn the lessons of why the throwaway version sucked by delivering it to customers. And it might buy you a lot of time, perhaps multiples of the initial time to get the pilot working.

Brooks has a point, but it may have been more true in the days of shrink-wrap software than SaaS and continuous updates.

I'd argue that it's more important to build an institution capable of retaining knowledge. The worst results are when the pilot system sucks and a whole new team is brought in to build the second version. They'll inevitably start building their pilot version, which sucks, and repeat until management gets sick of funding new teams for the same project (I feel this happens disproportionately in banking for some reason). Instead, you need to keep substantially the same team around to fix their mistakes in the second version.