[Sigia-l] Don't go chasing waterfalls?

[Dave Heller]

Interesting thread:

First, there is the ideal (which never exists) and then there is the
best you can do w/ what ya got.

I've bene on a project recently that has been very challenging from a
process perspective. My boss reminded me the other day, that there is
no such thing as a lack of process. Whatever you are doing is the
process at that time. 8-)  An important thing to remember when you are
doing work with mixed groups.

First, let me talk a little about the idea.
1. Know everything that there is to know about your business
2. Know everything that there is to know about your users & stakeholders
3. Have complete agreement on direction
4. Have finalized functional requirements
5. Design to requirements based on 1-3
6. Validate
7. Implement exactly as designed after Validation

Ok, was that a good chuckle for everyone ... kinda made me laugh a little too.

The current project I'm working on is the complete re-design of our
primary service offering (web-based hosted software). Lots of good
reasons for the re-design, but in all those business and technological
justification requiremnts was basically a blank sheet of paper.

Great opportunity right?

Of course all the functional teams had to start moving at the same
time. There could be no delays due to dependencies. A recipe for
design disaster, one might say.

But we just went at it, putting pen to paper and having weekly reviews
between the teams all doing different work and surprising nothing ever
really got all that thrown away AND once more, I think we've been able
to have GREATER effect on both the functional design (something usual
out of our domain) and the technology research than we would have
otherwise.

Now that we are past this discovery stage we are at a new point of
congruence and moving forward in a very similar way again.

Mind you this can get VERY frustrating, but it is also very invigorating.

My heart is all about waterfalls (physical and metaphorical), but I'm
enjoying this "new" process.

-- dave