This is true, but it doesn't mean software can be delivered at any point in the development process.
Something like a novel is (hopefully) shipment-ready at most points from the first draft on. A full rewrite might happen at some point, but much of the development process happens after the first draft and can be interrupted with minimal cleanup. If you've only copy-edited half of chapter one, you can still finalize those changes and ship without trouble. And, you're unlikely to get 95% of the way through writing and discover an issue in Chapter 10 that invalidates chapters 2-6. (This does happen, especially with mystery novels, but it's not the standards outcome. It's much more likely to just hit a problem that makes you want to rewrite, rather than actually breaking the piece.)
A lot of software has a high percentage of work happen ahead of the MVP, and even if progress past the MVP is done while maintaining a working state, the individual tasks don't tend to be interrupt-able. If that shipping system is instructed to handle bulk-loading of 50,000 orders, fixing the manual zip code issue is probably still an all-or-nothing task. And, of course, there's a high chance of invalidating past work. If a contract comes in that requires multi-user ownership of orders, that might break invariants across the entire database while still looking to the buyer like "just adding another user to my order".
Pretty much any field has some minimum unit of work to move between acceptable states. You might print a novel mid-editing, but not while a sentence is half reworked. You can launch a new car model with fewer units finished than you'd like, but not (easily) with contracts for dealers that will be unfulfilled, and certainly not if you find a problem with the airbags.
Software development frequently gets planned like creative or social work which generally has small minimum increments and few catastrophic surprises, but ends up playing out more like construction or physical manufacturing where unexpected failures are likely and shippable states are noticeably far apart. Hence death marches, outright broken releases, and a lot of the other issues the field is infamous for.
Something like a novel is (hopefully) shipment-ready at most points from the first draft on. A full rewrite might happen at some point, but much of the development process happens after the first draft and can be interrupted with minimal cleanup. If you've only copy-edited half of chapter one, you can still finalize those changes and ship without trouble. And, you're unlikely to get 95% of the way through writing and discover an issue in Chapter 10 that invalidates chapters 2-6. (This does happen, especially with mystery novels, but it's not the standards outcome. It's much more likely to just hit a problem that makes you want to rewrite, rather than actually breaking the piece.)
A lot of software has a high percentage of work happen ahead of the MVP, and even if progress past the MVP is done while maintaining a working state, the individual tasks don't tend to be interrupt-able. If that shipping system is instructed to handle bulk-loading of 50,000 orders, fixing the manual zip code issue is probably still an all-or-nothing task. And, of course, there's a high chance of invalidating past work. If a contract comes in that requires multi-user ownership of orders, that might break invariants across the entire database while still looking to the buyer like "just adding another user to my order".
Pretty much any field has some minimum unit of work to move between acceptable states. You might print a novel mid-editing, but not while a sentence is half reworked. You can launch a new car model with fewer units finished than you'd like, but not (easily) with contracts for dealers that will be unfulfilled, and certainly not if you find a problem with the airbags.
Software development frequently gets planned like creative or social work which generally has small minimum increments and few catastrophic surprises, but ends up playing out more like construction or physical manufacturing where unexpected failures are likely and shippable states are noticeably far apart. Hence death marches, outright broken releases, and a lot of the other issues the field is infamous for.