[Sigia-l] love thy client (was Re: [Sigia-l] "Study: Content Management Tools Fail")

[John O'Donovan-INTERNET]

It should say repetitively. Also please no more mention of Marriage. Makes me nervous.

You should always allow for prototyping but prototypes are only really useful if you mean to truly iterate more than once, build more than one prototype and learn from it. This means testing all elements of the deliverable so that there are fewer surprises in store for you. You could even consider the first version of any product a prototype. 

I believe in the 80 / 20 rule based on the Pareto Principle - 80% of your system is relatively easy to define and the last 20% of detail is incredibly difficult. Yet it will only take you 20% of the effort to get to grips with that easy to define 80%.

Whats the difference? Well have a look at the difference between the definitions of a prototyping approach:

http://www.worc.ac.uk/LTMain/Rowland/CIT105/Lectures/Lecture04/Prototyping.html

and a spiral lifecycle:

http://www.worc.ac.uk/LTMain/Rowland/CIT105/Lectures/Lecture04/spiral.html

You then get to agile methods such as DSDM which encompass the above as well as the 80 / 20 rule and pragmatic tradeoffs in delivering functionality, as well as other issues. Take this quote for example:

"Baselining high-level requirements means "freezing" and agreeing the purpose and scope of the system at a level, which allows for detailed investigation of what the requirements imply. Further, more detailed baselines can be established later in the development, although the scope should not change significantly."

It has taken methodologies decades to incorporate this much common sense. 
Cheers,

jod


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