Are irrevocable decisions made in software development ?

Question

(No-one's disputing there should be good backups, fallbacks, so nothing is irrevocable)

You need to be assured up front that the software development methodology is appropriate.

Personal trustworthiness needs to be established up front.

Answer 1

software developers,  publish their results premature and incomplete. It is a foot race.

Answer 2

Hmm, interesting point you have there.

Answer 3

Any decisions made in a software development process can be changed.  The question is what is the cost of the change.  

If a solution is well designed and development proceeds in stages, it is possible that changes in requirements in the later stages of the process will make the original design untenable.  This could mean that some or all of the development work that was done before hand would need to be redone.

But, it is all software, and none of it is set in stone until it is released.  Even then, patches and updates can be provided to add features or fix problems that were discovered after the release.

So, given unlimitted time and resources, no, there are no irrevocable decisions made in software development.  The problem is, most of us have to work on a schedule with a limitted amount of resources.  So, some decisions that are made can be too costly to implement after the development cycle has begun.

Answer 4

Software development methodologies attempt to reduce risk by gathering information and using structured processes. The implicit assumption is that by following a good methodology and identifying risk factors, software risk is reduced enough to avoid failure. However, a continuous stream of software failures may be a hint that there are risks that cannot be overcome by traditional approaches to software development. One key factor is the behaviour of decision makers using any methodology.All risk models assume that there is some probability of failure