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* The Gmail story contains an answer to the obvious question about agile models you might ask if you have only experienced waterfall models: How does anything ambitious get finished by groups of stubborn individuals heading in the foggiest possible direction of “maximal interestingness” with neither purist visions nor “customer needs” guiding them? * The answer is that it doesn’t get finished. But unlike in waterfall models, this does not necessarily mean the product is incomplete. It means the vision is perpetually incomplete and growing in unbounded ways, due to ongoing evolutionary experiments. When this process works well, what engineers call technical debt can get transformed into what we might call technical surplus. * The deeper significance of perpetual beta culture in technology often goes unnoticed: in the industrial age, engineering labs were impressive, enduring buildings inside which experimental products were created. In the digital age, engineering labs are experimental sections inside impressive, enduring products. * release early, release often (RERO) principle * Perhaps the most counter-intuitive consequence of the RERO principle is this: where engineers in other disciplines attempt to minimize the number of releases, software engineers today strive to maximize the frequency of releases. The industrial-age analogy here is the stuff of comedy science fiction: an intern launching a space mission just to ferry a single paper-clip to the crew of a space station. * In the context of agile processes, however, all such debt, created through either expedience or incompleteness, is not necessarily “must do” work. If an experimental feature is not actually adopted by users, or rendered unnecessary by a pivot, there may be no point in replacing an expedient solution with an idealized one. * Technical surplus can analogously be thought of as the unanticipated growth opportunities (or optionality in the sense of Nassim Taleb in Antifragile) created by users doing creative and unexpected things with existing features. Such opportunities require an expansion in the vision. The surplus comprises the spillover value of unanticipated uses. As in economics, a project with high technical debt is in a fragile state and vulnerable to zemblanity. A project with high technical surplus is in an antifragile state and open to serendipity. :PROPERTIES: :id: 6287caef-c942-4822-8ed0-8f137d9c372b :END: