Getting Results from Software Development Teams

Chapter 6. Modeling the Target System

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.

— W. Edwards Deming

One way to envision software development is as a process or system that consists of the creation, analysis, and use of a series of models that can overlap in time. In Chapter 5, we examined several methods for organizing a project, referred to as lifecycles. Those were methods for modeling our project. They provided a framework within which to plan, schedule, and control our project. But that framework alone is not sufficient to actually create a software system. It is simply a set of rules, goals, constraints, and completion dates. A second type of model is needed—one within which we can lay out the ...