D : Not for me anymore

[Bill Baxter]

Karen Lanrap wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
> 
>> Design/code/design/code... iteratively is the real process.
>> There's a good reason for that - too often when implementing a
>> design we discover that the design won't work or could at least
>> be improved. 
> 
> Who is 'we' in this case?
> 
> Following your statement a very tiny set of coworkers might avoid 
> desaster.
> 
> But your habits of evolving the D programming language make it hard 
> to believe that under such management principles a project of about 
> 1000 man years would come to success.

This sounds like a troll it's so far off base.

I only know of one "official" software design methodology and it's 
called "the waterfall model".  And the key point is that you have many 
different kinds of iterations between the different stages of software 
development:

from requirements
      to design
         to implementation
            to testing
               to delivery
                  to maintenance.

You generally flow down the steps from top to bottom, but at *any* stage 
you can get loops back up higher.  And in particular, you're never in 
just one stage.  Things can be happening in every stage simultaneously. 
  After delivery you frequently get feedback from your customer telling 
you that what you designed doesn't actually meet their requirements 
(often because their original requirements were too vague and they 
didn't actually know what they wanted either) --> back to requirements 
gathering.  Or testing reveals a bug --> back to implementation (of that 
one part).  Implementing the fix reveals a design flaw --> back to 
design (of that one part), etc.

Or maybe we just misunderstood you?

--bb