[TheOtherHobbes]

It's interesting - to me, anyway - that there's endless talk about patterns and methodologies and various heavily promoted (but often questionable) project management traditions in software.

But there's no formal, explicit and established pattern/process which guides a project through the stages of invention, innovation, refinement (debugging and user feedback), deployment and promotion, and preparation for maintenance with documentation.

If you're lucky and/or experienced and/or have good project management some of these things will be done well.

If not - nope.

In your case I can see why ASIC culture crept over to software. But if software had an existing culture, you - and everyone else - would be able to try out new ideas without management terror that you were going to break something.