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
More information about the Problem-statement
mailing list