When it comes to developing new features, the level of requirements is on a spectrum. At the one extreme is the Waterfall model. With waterfall, development is a one-way street that progresses from requirements to implementation to testing. At the other extreme is Cowboy coding, which leaves programmers to do what they think is best.
Where your development team falls on this scale depends on how intelligent and capable of seeing the big-picture your developers are. With full requirements, the coders only need to implement what is documented. Whereas, Linux, Google, Apache, MySQL, and many other projects where products of cowboy coders. Ideally, every programmer would be a genius with vision, but that's just not the case.
A happy medium is Agile software development, which can apply the structure of Waterfall to short iterations where developers are given more freedom.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
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1 comment:
I came across this site, which also talks about Waterfall and Agile: http://writethatdown.com/archives/2008/08/what-are-good-requirements
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