Removing a piece is scarier, because it feels so delicate, but you get plenty of tactile feedback from the piece you're pulling that tells you whether you're doing a dumb and should switch pieces. If there are no viable pieces, you're probably going to lose.
Adding a piece has no feedback. If you slightly nudge the tower while placing the piece, it could very easily topple then and there. You have to judge where to place the piece, and commit to it, without any room to finesse the placement if something goes wrong.
Anecdotally, all my Jenga losses have been when I was too stubborn with a pull, or when I simply misjudged a placement.
Beyond the immediate analogy, I don't think Jenga really matches with software development. In Jenga, the material you have to work with is fixed, and you must always move material rather than truly adding or removing over time. (And a Jenga game is designed to end in failure, unlike (or is it?) software engineering.)
If you look at something like a sand pile, where you're always adding grains, you'll find irregular but predictable catastrophes as the structure fails.
Adding a piece has no feedback. If you slightly nudge the tower while placing the piece, it could very easily topple then and there. You have to judge where to place the piece, and commit to it, without any room to finesse the placement if something goes wrong.
Anecdotally, all my Jenga losses have been when I was too stubborn with a pull, or when I simply misjudged a placement.
Beyond the immediate analogy, I don't think Jenga really matches with software development. In Jenga, the material you have to work with is fixed, and you must always move material rather than truly adding or removing over time. (And a Jenga game is designed to end in failure, unlike (or is it?) software engineering.)
If you look at something like a sand pile, where you're always adding grains, you'll find irregular but predictable catastrophes as the structure fails.