Beyond Requirements: Software Making as Art

N o one paying attention to software development recently could miss the raging methodology war. On one side you find formalists, who remain fond of the word " process, " emphasize detailed planning to produce quality products, and aspire to a level of repeatability that evokes manufacturing imagery. On the other side you find agilists, who value " individuals and interactions over processes and tools " and " responding to change over following a plan " (" Manifesto for Agile Software Development, " http://agilemanifesto.org) and who dislike manufacturing imagery applied to knowledge work. Each camp likes to describe the other in extreme terms. Agilists highlight the shortcomings of waterfall methodologies, with which they identify formalists. According to agilists, the formalist approach's orientation toward planning means that by the time you finish a system, the problem it solves has changed; you might build software with few defects this way, but when you're done, it's the wrong software. Formalists accuse agilists of trying to turn back time to when developers started by immediately slinging code. Many systems built this way evolved into hairballs of complex, unmanageable code, formalists say; without plenty of planning up front, you'll invariably make a mess. The notion of requirements is central to this debate. Formalists can't see how agilists expect to build anything that works without thoroughly analyzing requirements. Agilists can't see the point in spending a lot of time analyzing requirements because they're going to change anyway. This conflict is nothing less than growing pains associated with a transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy. Even as they try to move the debate forward, com-batants bang repeatedly against a conceptual wall propped up by the word requirements. As we explain this, we'll inevitably reveal where our sympathies lie, so here they are: We think agilists are at the leading edge of an important shift in how we will manage work in a knowledge economy. It's hard to see this right now because the metaphor the word " requirements " evokes tilts the battlefield against agilists. The need for a new metaphor Formalist software developers can muster to their cause many words we've rightly asso-Quality is meeting requirements—or is it? Rob Austin and Lee Devin challenge this familiar metaphor for requirements and introduce a new one based on their experience in an industry that seems far from software development—or is it? What are your opinions on …