Keynote 1

Summary form only given: On the road to a successful software product, there are key milestones that you should not skip. Each of them is a chance to see if you are on the right path and to correct your direction if you are not. Each milestone is a document that records key design decisions in a way that allows them to be reviewed and analyzed. The meaning of each document must be precisely defined and there must be no ambiguity. If the document is vague and subject to many interpretations, it can lead you down a path from which recovery is difficult. This talk proposes and illustrates a set of software documents that can serve as precise (and immovable) milestones. It discusses how they can be analyzed and used to guide the project on the rest of its trip to completion. To obtain the necessary precision, and to make analysis possible, the documents are mathematical expressions but written in a way that makes them easy to read.