I find that this is especially noticable in game development. During the project you build all kinds of tooling and supportive infrastructure to make your workflow faster and reduce churn. But building the infrastructure costs time, and it has diminishing returns.
That is because once the game has a stable release, your tooling is barely useful anymore. So as you’re nearing the finish line, you have to be aware that fixing bugs in the tooling becomes a lower and lower priority. In a way it’s kind of sad and melancholic. You build this beautiful piece of software that will likely never see the day of light, but it helped so much in making the game what it is.
Being aware of how the lifecycle affects your engineering priorities is super important.
I find that this is especially noticable in game development. During the project you build all kinds of tooling and supportive infrastructure to make your workflow faster and reduce churn. But building the infrastructure costs time, and it has diminishing returns.
That is because once the game has a stable release, your tooling is barely useful anymore. So as you’re nearing the finish line, you have to be aware that fixing bugs in the tooling becomes a lower and lower priority. In a way it’s kind of sad and melancholic. You build this beautiful piece of software that will likely never see the day of light, but it helped so much in making the game what it is.
Being aware of how the lifecycle affects your engineering priorities is super important.