| No, I wouldn't call that a complete misunderstanding; I'd call it a minor simplifying inaccuracy. Quoting Dr. Royce: > Management of software is simply impossible without a very high degree of documentation. How much documentation? > In order to procure a 5 million dollar hardware device, I would expect that a 30 page specification would provide adequate detail to control procurement. In order to procure 5 million dollars of software I would estimate a 1500 page specification is about right in order to achieve comparable control. 5 million 1970 dollars is equivalent to about 30 million 2013 dollars, so for a $30 million project, his advice is: 1. Write a huge stack of documentation. Literally stop everything until that documentation is written. 2. Get feedback from reality and from your stakeholders exactly once. Sure, having one opportunity to act on feedback is better than never having any, but it doesn't fundamentally change the process or the risks involved. What the Agile folks realized is that reliable software development is an experimental process. If you only do one experiment, you're still missing that point. |