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

[John O'Donovan-INTERNET]

Hmmmm bad link maybe - late at night. It was just for quick reference and was the first link I found, but I did mean Boehm :), whatever Rowland Gallop meant. 

I'm not sure you understood the point - a waterfall model does not involve much common sense at all. Trying to document and understand all elements before proceeding is a known pitfall in software projects.

The standard waterfall model is associated with the failure or cancellation of many large systems. Particularly the problem that requirements must be fixed before the system is designed. Inevitable doom and not very sensible.

Classic Waterfall model is just:

Requirements Analysis
Functional Specification
Design
Implementation
Testing

In that order. There was room to revise some earlier assumptions but no real iteration. Misunderstandings early on can bring down the whole project.

Moving forward a spiral model is more flexible, for example,

"The primary advantage of the spiral model is that its range of options allows it to accommodate the best features of existing software process models, while its risk-driven approach helps it to avoid most of their difficulties. In appropriate situations, the spiral model becomes equivalent to one of the existing process models. In other situations, it provides guidance on the best mix of existing approaches to be applied to a given project."

All of this leads us to the more agile methods. The principles of a methodology like DSDM are very sensible indeed...

Cheers,

jod


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