Spiral Development: Experience, Principles, and Refinements

Abstract

Spiral development is a family of software development processes characterized by repeatedly iterating a set of elemental development processes and managing risk so it is actively being reduced. This paper characterizes spiral development by enumerating a few "invariant" properties that any such process must exhibit. For each, a set of "variants" is also presented, demonstrating a range of process definitions in the spiral development family. Each invariant excludes one or more "hazardous spiral look-alike" models, which are also outlined. This report also shows how the spiral model can be used for a more cost-effective incremental commitment of funds, via an analogy of the spiral model to stud poker. An important and relatively recent innovation to the spiral model has been the introduction of anchor point milestones. The latter part of the paper describes and discusses these.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 01, 2000
Accession Number
ADA382590

Entities

People

  • Barry Boehm
  • Wilfred J. Hansen

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Cognitive Systems Engineering
  • Command And Control
  • Commerce
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Electronic Commerce
  • Graphical User Interface
  • Risk Analysis
  • Risk Management
  • Software Design
  • Software Development
  • Spiral Development
  • Systems Engineering
  • Test And Evaluation
  • User Interface

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.
  • Software Engineering