Barry Boehm, "Defects found early in the development cycle are less expensive" does not apply today.
I heard this in a podcast and tracked down the session notes where it was said.
“why it had taken so long for the agile development methodologies to become known and accepted.”
Here were the responses from the panel:
Tom DeMarco responded quickly with the quip, “It’s all Barry ’s fault!” He went on to suggest that we had all been brainwashed by Barry Boehm ’s argument, first published in his Software Engineering Economics book, that the cost of repairing defects rises exponentially the later they’re found in the software life cycle (for a more recent exposition of this point, see the December 19, 2005 Dr. Dobb’s article by Yochi Slonim , “The Software Quality Lifecycle “). He said that as a result, the commandment “get the requirements right!” was drummed into the heads of a generation of software engineers. Tom turned towards Barry , smiled, wagged his finger, and said, “And I have never forgiven you!”
Barry Boehm relieved the tension in the air by agreeing with Tom . He explained that, back in the 1970s, he had linked up with Win Royce at TRW, where the two of them found that the waterfall methodology worked pretty well. But he acknowledged that they were working in an application domain (aerospace systems, military systems), and in a time, when the end-user’s requirements were fairly well-defined; consequently, it made a great deal of sense to capture those requirements early, rather than discovering later on that a great deal of software had been built to implement the wrong requirements. But Boehm acknowledged that by the 1980s, things had begun to change drastically … and obviously this continues to be true today.
http://www.yourdonreport.com/index.php/2007/05/29/icse-peopleware-panel-session/
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft%3A*&q=tom+demarco+said+it+is+Barry%27s+fault
“why it had taken so long for the agile development methodologies to become known and accepted.”
Here were the responses from the panel:
Tom DeMarco responded quickly with the quip, “It’s all Barry ’s fault!” He went on to suggest that we had all been brainwashed by Barry Boehm ’s argument, first published in his Software Engineering Economics book, that the cost of repairing defects rises exponentially the later they’re found in the software life cycle (for a more recent exposition of this point, see the December 19, 2005 Dr. Dobb’s article by Yochi Slonim , “The Software Quality Lifecycle “). He said that as a result, the commandment “get the requirements right!” was drummed into the heads of a generation of software engineers. Tom turned towards Barry , smiled, wagged his finger, and said, “And I have never forgiven you!”
Barry Boehm relieved the tension in the air by agreeing with Tom . He explained that, back in the 1970s, he had linked up with Win Royce at TRW, where the two of them found that the waterfall methodology worked pretty well. But he acknowledged that they were working in an application domain (aerospace systems, military systems), and in a time, when the end-user’s requirements were fairly well-defined; consequently, it made a great deal of sense to capture those requirements early, rather than discovering later on that a great deal of software had been built to implement the wrong requirements. But Boehm acknowledged that by the 1980s, things had begun to change drastically … and obviously this continues to be true today.
http://www.yourdonreport.com/index.php/2007/05/29/icse-peopleware-panel-session/
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft%3A*&q=tom+demarco+said+it+is+Barry%27s+fault
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