564-2010-Analysis-Development

Analysis
If design is the process of making goal-oriented choices under constraints, then analysis is the process of understanding the constraints and goals.


 * Gap Analysis - The difference between what the learner knows / can do and what s/he should know / be able to do.
 * Performance Analysis - What it the cause of the performance gap? (http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/isd/analyze_system.html)
 * Audience Analysis - Characteristics of the learners, including prior knowledge and past experiences, socio-cultural and demographic information, motivation levels, etc.
 * Content / Task Analysis - What is the nature / underlying structure of the domain or job that is to be learned?
 * Resource Analysis - What resources are available? To learners / employees today? To the design team?
 * Practical Constraints Analysis - What budget, time, media, are specified in the contract / implied by the environment?
 * Cost-Benefit Analysis - Will learning outcomes justify the costs?

Agile development

 * Customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software
 * Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
 * Working software is the principal measure of progress
 * Even late changes in requirements are welcomed
 * Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
 * Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)
 * Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
 * Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
 * Simplicity
 * Self-organizing teams
 * Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

The Open Source Way
(Selections from The Cathedral and the Bazaar)

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.

2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).

3. "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11)

4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.

5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.

6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.

8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. Or, less formally, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." I dub this: "Linus's Law".

10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.

11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.

12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

13. "Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away." Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.

18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.

19: Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.