The soggy principle (for software releases)

Seth Godin offers a great explanation of why things get harder as time goes by in an organization with the Soggy principle.

Each project you start has unaccounted for activity that goes beyond the “we’re done” moment
As your projects gather more success, there’s more scrutiny, so things slow down
You have to deal with undoing prior mistakes, which takes time
Your past projects have set a standard that now you fear not surpassing.

As it relates to software releases, this couldn’t be truer. We’re just in the first few days after a major release and we find that:

It took as long to go from paper to software as it took to go from software to shippable software
It took twice as long to design the software as it took previously, as we became more sophisticated in our requirements gathering and design
It took a third of the software engineering time to refactor the previous version and clean up.
With v.1 we had no customers at the time of the upgrade, with v.1.5 we had several hundred with very clear expectations from us.