Thanks for reading and commenting!

In the debate between Beck and Cooper, if I recall correctly, Beck was in favor of days of upfront analysis, in contrast with Cooper who felt like weeks of big upfront design would be required for a large project. While a couple days isn’t “none”, it is comparatively miniscule.

The challenge is to understand enough of the domain to know which of the handfull of initial requirements is actually the most valuable. That’s where I tend to like the FDD approach versus XP.

In keeping with the mining analogy, think of it as a detailed survey in advance of strip mining, to increase the likelihood of finding the most valuable requirements when the digging begins.

“Beck’s argument is that because customer’s don’t know what they want, we should start building stuff right away [emphasis added], with the expectation that by seeing tangible results (good or bad), they will have epiphanies about what they really do want.”

While Beck does favor building the system early and often, he doesn’t favor building it “right away”. A “planning game” and initial set of user stories come first.

“While this approach has strengths, it also has weaknesses. Those weaknesses are caused by the assumption that the requirements can not be identified up front.”

Beck favors specifying requirements up front, just not to a high level of detail. His assumption is that noone can know all of the requirements up front, and that some of the ones you think you know will change.

Your comparison to strip-mining nicely captures things:

“This approach treats requirement extraction as an emergent process, like strip-mining. With each new layer of mining, we unearth a new set of hidden requirements.”