An old article I just came across, posits that learning is the thing of value in software development:
When we present this hypothetical situation to students – many of them with 20+ years experience in building software – they typically respond with anywhere between 20% to 70% of the original time. That is, rebuilding a system that originally takes one year to build takes only 2.5 to 8.5 months to build. That’s a huge difference! It’s hard to identify another single factor that could affect software development that much!
The article goes on to discuss in detail how learning is enabled by agile processes. The advantages of quick feedback cycles are not just ‘fail early’, but also ’learn early’ (and continuously).
Agile Feedback Loops