From: Andrew Gabb (agabb@tpgi.com.au)
Date: Sat May 01 2004 - 22:14:41 EST
Ilia Bider wrote:
> At 22:14 2004-04-28 +0100, Keith.Collyer@telelogic.com wrote:
>> This reminds me of David Parnas and Paul Clements's classic paper "A
>> Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It". Although I suspect this
>> wasn't the intent. Even if the information is gathered bottom-up, it is
>> better presented top-down as that is the easiest way for us to navigate
>> around.
>
> And here we have a big problem!
>
> People who read our presentations, especially inexperienced ones, believe
> that this is how the results have been obtained (top-down). They try to
> follow the example and fail.
... and others use the fact that even experienced REs do *some*
bottom-up RE/RA as an excuse for *always* doing bottom-up or bottom-only (the real danger). They also use it as an excuse for bottom-up design, which is something rather different.
I've seen internationally respected systems engineers at work, including those that give some of the more popular industrial strength (as opposed to academic) SyE courses. They almost always use a mixture, but some strenuously deny that they do *any* bottom up. Somehow this part of their analysis/design is invisible to them.
If you read practical SyE texts, you would be be forgiven for believing that SyE is a reductionist approach. In practice, it rarely is, but there is always some reductionism (otherwise you'd never finish the job, obviously). That doesn't mean the texts or process models are necessarily wrong, just incomplete like all models.
More grist for my Impurity Principle.
Andrew
-- Andrew Gabb email: agabb@tpgi.com.au Adelaide, South Australia phone: +61 8 8342-1021, fax: +61 8 8269-3280 ----- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To send a message to this mailing list send it to re-online@it.uts.edu.au. To unsubscribe from this mailing list, email majordomo@it.uts.edu.au with the message `unsubscribe re-online' in the BODY of the mail.
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