The "late surprise" problem

Keith Moore moore at cs.utk.edu
Tue Mar 25 23:07:07 CET 2003


> Hmm. In software development, it has been recognized for 8 years or so
> that the waterfall model gives far to long development cycles --
> iterative development lets you work on specification, design,
> implementation and testing in parallel, giving faster results, better
> throughput, better understanding and better solutions.

software development is not representative of engineering as a whole, 
and it's not clear that the lesson of software development is more 
applicable to protocol engineering than the lessons from other forms of 
engineering.  also, the lessons you cite from software development are 
heavily-biased toward the fast-changing markets we were seeing a few 
years ago; they are not necessarily applicable to a more stable 
software market.

iterative development can work well when you have enough knowledge, 
experience, and intuition about the problem that your first prototype 
is within epsilon of the final solution, and when you have the luxury 
of doing testing before actually having to use the product.  neither of 
these conditions seems to hold here.

Keith



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