Do not show a polished product too early

Jason Yip pointed me to an interesting post by Kathy Sierra: Don’t make the Demo Look Done. Also a nice reminder of Joel’s Iceberg Secret.
That brings back fond memories of the beginnings of our project. Our client wanted to see a running Use Case as early as possible. The problem became that they demanded to see a perfect front-end… down to the pixel. So we kept going back and forth, releasing to the client and then tuning those nasty pixels, for months. All that, of course, while we knew we would have to redo most of it since the graphical framework was still under development. Of course, we explained how useless it was, but hey, it was in the contract, right?!