I know somebody who used to work for a custom home builder; they did high-end primary and vacation homes. I promise you that many of their customers had approximately equivalent desires. What the homebuilder had was a well-honed process for channeling and managing those expectations.
We can have that in software too if we want it and work for it. But it requires building a ton of alignment among customer service, sales, design, construction, and executive staff. Everybody who talks to the customer has to know what to say and how to direct requests. Everybody needs to know what they can say yes to easily and what has to get estimated, approved, and charged.
But that in turn requires extremely skilled and disciplined management, something our industry is not oversupplied with. The Agile movement gave us tools to make that work (CI, CD, good testing practices, refactoring), but that only works in a particular envelope of management competence. Outside of that, it's GIGO.
We can have that in software too if we want it and work for it. But it requires building a ton of alignment among customer service, sales, design, construction, and executive staff. Everybody who talks to the customer has to know what to say and how to direct requests. Everybody needs to know what they can say yes to easily and what has to get estimated, approved, and charged.
But that in turn requires extremely skilled and disciplined management, something our industry is not oversupplied with. The Agile movement gave us tools to make that work (CI, CD, good testing practices, refactoring), but that only works in a particular envelope of management competence. Outside of that, it's GIGO.