Bulldozer00's Blog

In response to my previous post, Glen Alleman pointed out that for large system development projects, the technical plan must be preceded by a higher level, coarser, activity. Glen is right.

Senior analysts and architects don’t just sit down and start designing the technical plan from scratch. They work with experienced, knowledgeable customers to develop, define, and document the capabilities that the system must satisfy in order to solve their problem. Thus, I’ve augmented my diagram to show this important activity:

We’re not done yet. There is still (at least) one more front end activity missing from the diagram: the problem definition phase:

So, what precedes the problem definition phase? The pain of problem discovery….

The Agile community does a great job of defining how the back end should be managed for cost-effective product development, but IMO they are mostly silent on the much-more-important, fuzzy, front end.