Fully Elaborated Documents As a Completion Criteria …

In May 1988, Bary W. Bohem published an article about Spiral Model. He described the available, at this time, software models and write some of its advantages and disadvantages. I liked the following paragraph from his article.

“A primary source of difficulty with the waterfall model has been its emphasis on fully elaborated documents as a completion criteria for early requirements and design phases. For some classes of software, such as compilers or secure operating systems, this is the most effective way to proceed. However, it does not work well for many classes of software, particularly interactive end-user applications.
Document driven standards have pushed many projects to write elaborate specifications of poorly understood user interfaces and decision support functions, followed by the design and development of large quantities of unusable code.”

It is risky to treat software process improvements initiatives as just a punch of documents as Bohem stated above.

From ahm507.blogspot.com