D : Not for me anymore

[Bill Baxter]

Karen Lanrap wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
> 
> 
>>You generally flow down the steps from top to bottom, but at
>>*any* stage you can get loops back up higher.
> 
> 
> Are you sure?
> 
> Assume an idealized situation where you take over a team of 10 
> designers and 490 coders.
> 
> Your team has projects A and B in the pipeline.
> 
> Project A is in the beginning of the design phase, planned duration 
> two years, and project B is in the beginning of the coding phase, 
> planned duration also two years.
> 
> your remaining budgets:
> for designing project A   4,000,000 $
> for coding project B    147,000,000 $
> 
> This means every month delay will cost you at least 6,000,000 $
> 
> Now one of your 490 coders comes to you saying: "I am unable to 
> implement this because of erroneous design."
> 
> Are you willing to "sell" this detection to your management, your 
> sponsor or your loan officer?
> 
> And if you change positions: are you willing to "buy" such statements 
> from yourself?
> 
> "Dear Sir, I have a plan to produce software that only costs you 
> 150,000,000$. My main production plan consists of repeated designing 
> and coding, because every design is flawed. But although every design 
> is flawed I am sure I do not need more money than what I said 
> before." 

It sounds like we're just talking about things on a completely different 
scale.  We're talking about *iterations* on one design.  You seem to be 
talking about scrapping the initial design completely and starting over. 
  Although there is a school of thought that says you should always plan 
to "throw the first one away" -- i.e. build a prototype, learn from it, 
then do the real thing -- I will agree that in the real-world that's 
almost always disastrous.

But we're not talking about complete redesign from scratch and starting 
over with fresh code.  We're talking about design iterations. 
Incremental improvements to the original design.

--bb