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'The Year That Software Bugs Ate the World' (fastcompany.com)
FastCompany's harrymcc writes: It's not like there's ever a year that isn't rife with stories about buggy software. But 2017 seems to have had an unusually rich supply of software flaws that fouled up major products -- from Twitter to iOS 11 to the Google Pixel 2 -- in ways that were very noticeable and sometimes even funny. Sample this: A nagging flaw in Google's Play Services software for Android causes Gmail to demand access to "body sensors" before it will let users send email. Android Police's Artem Russakovskii discovers that his Mini is recording audio 24/7 and storing it on Google's servers. I rounded up a bunch of them over at Fast Company.
99 bugs in the code to be fixed, 99 bugs in the code. Fix a bug, wrap it up, 148 bugs in the code...
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
At the beginning of a project, it doesn't make sense to invest a lot of development effort into a comprehensive, secure, bug-free, scalable, and robust foundation. Doing so costs a fortune and your business flops before it is finished. And anyway the market hasn't tested your offering yet so you don't know if it is going to live long enough to need a foundation that is that advanced.
During the mid-life of the project the need for a better foundation starts coming up, but it still doesn't make sense to spring for it because the application-wide refactor will be harmfully impactful to existing clients, and (more importantly) it doesn't sell anything in the short-term. Even though it will save a lot in the long-term, that savings just can't compete with the money that is sitting on the table if you just add a few more features instead.
Yes, there are bugs that clients feel, but they aren't bad enough for the clients to abandon the project, and even the clients would rather pay for new features than fixing bugs they are already working-around.
At the end of the project it obviously doesn't make sense to put the solid foundation in, nor to fix the majority of the longstanding bugs, because it won't be around long enough to capture any profit from that bandwidth.