Software can be done

Published August 1, 2025

For years when I was running a software development agency we would tell clients “software is never done” during our discovery phase. If you’ve done agency work in this space, you’ll recognize the dilemma. The client wants to add more and more features - each of them of equal importance to the last. But, you know that you have a limited amount of time and money to work with. There’s only so much you can do under those constraints, so you advocate for removing scope to meet the constraints. “Well, the nice thing about software is that it’s never truly done. We can always add it later.”

And there’s truth to this. Cutting scope in this way is often the shortest path to getting something done. You can always add it later. You can always kick the can down the road. It’s a slipperly slope that often leads to a bloated, half finished slew of features that nobody wants to use, and an ever growing back log of bug reports and feature requests.

This is the beauty and the curse of software. It’s highly malleable. You can always come back and change it. You can always add more later, or take something away. The downside of this is that it creates a tendency to never fully commit. But you can decide to commit. You can decide what it means for a piece of software to be done. It takes careful shaping and iteration, but it can be done.