[catdog]

> The key phrase here is “requirements analysis” and if you’re not good at it either your software sucks or you’re going to iterate needlessly and waste massive time including on bad architecture. You don’t iterate the foundation of a house.

This depends heavily on the kind of problem you are trying to solve. In a lot of cases requirements are not fixed but evolve over time, either reacting to changes in the real word environment or by just realizing things which are nice in theory are not working out in practice.

You don’t iterate the foundation of a house because we have done it enough times and also the environment the house exists in (geography, climate, ...) is usually not expected to change much. If that were the case we would certainly build houses differently than we usually do.

[airbreather]

The key first step here is "Problem Identification" - the number of times I have seen where it is part way through a development, and only then it starts to become obvious that even if the specifications were good, they were not solving the right problem.

Users have a habit of describing their problem as the solution they think they would like to have, often being disastrously far from the actual need.