But the word subtractive doesn't make sense though unless you know exactly what the end product will be. And if you know exactly what the end product will be then designing the car is not fundamentally different from building it since in essence the car is already designed, you just hammer out the details. A programmer who just picks tasks from a kanban is not creative, he just adds code to do the thing the board requests. Doing more stuff from the board all else being the same is always better, he is an additive worker. If he does it faster but produce shoddy work it is the same as if a factory worker works faster but produce shoddy parts on the car, meaning he will get fired because he ruins it.
In most orgs of a size, only a handful of people are adding tickets to the queue. And even then, that's only an "additive workflow" if you insist on ignoring the system the author is describing.
Whether you know all the work to be done or not, there is a quantity of work to be done after which there will be no more work to do. Some of that work might be learning what all the work is. Some of the work might be defining how to do some of the other work. Other work is just picking work off of the pile and doing it. All of these are subtracting from the total quantity of work that will have been done by completing the project.
Not knowing the quantity or boundaries does not change this nature.
> Whether you know all the work to be done or not, there is a quantity of work to be done after which there will be no more work to do.
Does that imply the existential possibility of a finished software product? To me it is precluded by ever-changing requirements and impossibility of bug-free software.
> Some of that work might be learning what all the work is. Some of the work might be defining how to do some of the other work. … All of these are subtracting from the total quantity of work that will have been done by completing the project.
If an activity changes the pile of work, can it be positively claimed subtraction took place?
Given pile of work A and activity ƒ, we can say ƒ is subtractive only if its intention was to make ƒ(A) ⊆ A.
If ∂(A) ⊊ A (intentionally, not because some regressions were accidentally introduced), then I don’t see how ∂ is subtractive. New pile of work may be (but doesn’t have to be) smaller, but it is not a subset of the original pile.
I believe a lot of activity is like ∂, especially in smaller teams where enabling continuous pile-of-work redefinition may be more beneficial than subtracting from the pile.
