Ivan Krivyakov's Blog

Larman says (p. 22) that as the system goes through more iterations it converges “towards final requirements and design” and draws a wavy graph with the size of the waves diminishing with time. My experience seems to disagree with that. As long as the system is “alive” there is no such thing as ‘final requirements’: new features and requests are invented all the time. Occasionally they are just incremental, but frequently they change significant portions of existing functionality.

I bought Larman’s “Applying UML and Patterns” about a month ago, but had hard time getting to actually read it. This is my first note for a long time – I hope there will be more to follow.

He is promoting the [Rational] Unified Process (UP), but he is quite good in avoiding holy wars. He says (p. 18-19) that the UP is only an example, and you need to use some process to illustrate the techniques. Also, he says that the UP “combines commonly accepted best practices” and that the author “encourages clients to understand and adopt a blend of useful techniques from several methods, rather than a dogmatic ‘my method is better than your method’ mentality”.

This may be just a way to sweet talk opponents and play down the disagreements, but I do like it.