[unionpivo]

> - It is driven entirely by formal requirements and specifications Can you explain why this is a bad thing? I've found that formal requirements and specifications are almost always good unless they're just vague (in which case: they're not really formal)

I have been in various projects for government and enterprises (non military, mostly medical and banking fields) with formal requirements and some without. I can say that those without always had better GUI and people using them liked it better. I think that one major reason is that most people can't really imagine application without actually using it. Only once they are using it they can give you useful feedback (as in this is important, this isn't, make that action default etc.)

Another reason is that people that are not using it are writing requirements. For instance in a lot of medical applications, people who will write specs and requirements are Business managers or doctors (or both), but not radiology technicians and nurses that will actually use the software. So they have no idea of day to day workflow - just desired outcome. So software will suck 100% if based only on their requirements (in my personal experience).