For years, those of us involved in the business of developing applications were told that there's a right way and wrong way to approach software development. There's a "development life-cycle" that has a beginning and an end. You start out in the beginning with Planning, then work your way through Requirements, Design, Development, Testing, and then ultimately to Deployment, that magical moment when the One True Way results in the production implementation of the perfect information system. Sure, there were always folks who didn't follow the Way, the Truth, and the Light of the latest applications development methodology, but those poor souls were just hackers, simpletons who couldn't tell a Warnier-Orr diagram from a HIPO chart. They weren't trained professionals in the field of information systems applications development.

For the highly skilled application developer there was a process--a formal process. The larger the project is, the more formal the process. The process was divided into phases, and every phase had its list of things that you did and did not do during that phase. These were the rules, and if you were doing a good job, you didn't step outside the lines. You didn't design the solution during the planning phase and you didn't change requirements during the development phase. There was a time and a place for everything, and you kept everything within its boundaries of time and place.

The problem, of course, was that on large-scale projects, that created a tremendous time lag between the time that you gathered your requirements and the time you delivered your software. Even if everything went perfectly--and let's face it, nothing ever did--the best that you could hope for when you finally delivered the software was that you had the perfect solution to the problems that you had two years ago! After all that time and all that money, that really wasn't much to look forward to.

Development projects and the proverbial elephant
As with most problems, particularly once the solution becomes evident, the answer is really quite simple. Obviously, the process needs to be shortened. But how? There have been those who attempted to eliminate steps in the process, but most of the steps in the process are there for a reason. Home-builders don't send a bunch of carpenters and plumbers out to a job site with truckloads of materials in the anticipation that the group will start hammering things together and see what starts to take shape. Those planning and design steps are important.