Archive for the ‘Evolutionary Design’ Category

Making Progress in Spite of Uncertainty

Friday, May 28th, 2010

At the start of a new development effort, there is considerable uncertainty. There are unknowns in hardware, software, product goals and requirements. How can we get started with all this uncertainty? Isn’t better to wait? If you wait, there really is no end to the waiting, so its better to get started sooner even though there will be some things you decide early that get changed later.
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Agile Design and Embedded

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

One important realization on the journey from a BDUF approach to an iterative and agile approach is that design is never done. Designs evolve. The waterfall emphasis has been to unnaturally try to control software physics by imposing requirements freezes and burdensome change control. The process of developing software is part science and part creative. You are applying science toward the invention of something. Design is capturing knowledge both about what the end user need is, and one solution to that need.
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