Chris Hills from Phaedsys sent me this link regarding the use of the V-Model for the NASA Mars Phoenix Lander:
http://news.oreilly.com/2008/07/the-soft...hind-the-mars-p.html
So you get a go ahead and then the funds start to develop your requirements and you have those reviewed. And we have a lifecycle that we use at JPL where we go through a requirements definition and then we go into our preliminary design phase and then we go into a detail design phase. And then at the end of detail design, you actually have most of the components ready to be assembled and you start to assemble and integrate and test the vehicle. And so roughly speaking, you spend something like nine months in your requirements definition and then another year in your design phase, maybe a year and a half. And then you spend a year to a year and a half in your test phase. And then you launch it.
It sounds like a pretty standard waterfall cycle. Is that correct?
Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's a pretty standard waterfall cycle. Now the software typically iterates a few times.
So, looks like if you have a five year project, where you can really capture the requirements upfront, and then iterate the development of the software a few times, then you could say that the V-Model (waterfall) works.
However, I suspect that NASA have reams of procedures that actually define the process that implement the V-Model, and I think this is the key here. Also, if you iterate your software development, then it's not really the V-Model is it...?
comments?
Ed
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