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This is one reason I'd much rather be discovery-oriented than goal-oriented.

If you look at all of these as just part of achieving your goal, then all of these are negatives. The compiler prevents you from achieving things, your bug reports remind you how you haven't achieved them, every missed deadline makes you wonder if you'll ever achieve them, and your customers don't appreciate it when you do achieve them.

But if you look at all of this as a process of discovering what customers want and how to accomplish that, all of those negatives become positives. Your compiler error tells you early about something that would've become a problem later on. Your bug report reminds you of a case you haven't handled, some subtlety of the problem that you're just now learning about. Your missed deadlines mean that you didn't know enough about the project to estimate accurately before, so now you have more information about its true scope. And your unhappy customers will tell you ways in which you can improve.

Same facts, wildly different interpretations.




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