The analysis of the overall task and platform is important in the short term, because it enables us to draft a few lists to be used in following stages of the development:
The understanding phase takes the restrictions, requirements from the rest of the team, and goals from the design and attempts to describe the problem:
Both these preliminary phases provide long-term benefits because they offer a way to check design ideas for consistency and allow empirical evaluation of the implementation. Revealing the criteria that are least satisfied is a good way to identify parts of the solution that need improving. After another practical experiment, the next chapter defines an interface specification that provides the skeleton for the implementation of moving animats.
|