The Laws of Software Process

235

The Five Orders of Ignorance

the code, writing it again should be straightforward and rather quick. The

act of doing this intentionally is called prototyping.

As a development life cycle model and arguably a business model proto-

typing actively acknowledges that our job is not to build a system but to

acquire knowledge. We do not expect to get a functioning system first time

out when we prototype. What we do expect to get is (at least some of) the

knowledge we need to build the system. We use prototyping particularly

when we do not know in advance what kind of knowledge we might need.

We would not consider prototyping in situations where we knew what we

had to do in advance.

While we have used the activity of hacking code as a way of explaining

this ...