Iteration
Dorian Taylor, on agile and “requirements gathering”:
The problem is that a “requirements gathering phase” has a persistent downward pressure because everybody wants to “get building”. As such they are very rarely adequately resourced, because if they were, they would literally be the job, as the requirements don’t stop accruing just because the requirements phase does.
But what if we’re discovering new ways of creating software?
The Agile people assert that this is what iterating is for, and they’re right some of the time, but many of the questions about what the software should or should not do can be settled without writing even a single line of code