Through the Looking-glass of “Requirements-uncertainty”…

“Requirements-uncertainty” (I’ll call it RU from now on) is one of the “big” ideas in the information systems and software engineering literature, so I think it deserves a chapter of its own. The advice to project managers in the RU literature is that, as the level of uncertainty around user requirements increases, one should move away from the traditional waterfall life cycle model and towards a more “experimental” model, based on prototyping and evolutionary or incremental development. How does this advice square with the strategies advocated by our PMs? To answer this question, we must first pin down the notion of “requirements-uncertainty.”