[eevilspock]

I completely agree. Wells's proposal also contradicts "Good design is thorough."

If a design is thorough and long lasting, then why would you need to iterate, much less "ship every day"? Sure, iteration might eventually lead to a good design, but the intervening designs by Rams's definition are not good.

The exception would be when each iteration is thorough and each successive iteration represents a new innovation (principal 1). But most iterative development is not a sequence of distinct innovations. It is a sequence of partial or tentative designs either because there is a business need to ship prior to arriving at a complete design or because the complete design hasn't yet been figured out.

Wells says that the design of physical things can't be updated often, if ever. He says, "This doesn’t work for software anymore." But perhaps that is the problem with much of the software we produce these days. Quantity (of updates, frequency of new features) supercedes quality (of both function and design).

Wells does not seem to quite get Rams.