Our attempts to use the Waterfall Methodology, an approach which assumes a fully constrained development environment, has been a fools errand. The debate between these two camps has heated up during the last year, with major bombardments in the press and on the Internet. Every debate needs to refer to first principles. In the case of the people that claim systems development is unpredictable and chaotic, the first principles from process engineering have been used.6 The question, Defined or Empirical, was put to process automation scientists at DuPont's Advanced Research Facility. They inspected some of the leading systems development processes and concluded that it is no surprise that most development projects don't reach their planned conclusion.
Systems development is an empirical, unpredictable process.
Correctly categorizing a process is critical to its successful implementation. Models of defined processes are derived from first principles, using material and energy balances and fundamental laws to determine the process model. For a systems development process to be categorized as defined, it would have to conform to this definition. Models of empirical processes are derived categorizing observed inputs and outputs, and defining controls that cause them to occur within prescribed bounds. The process is changing The scientists were particularly amazed at our industry's failure to use effective controls on our empirical process.