Spiral Development: Experience, Principles, and Refinements (Spiral Development Workshop February 9, 2000)

Barry Boehm
(edited by Wilfred J. Hansen)

Special Report
CMU/SEI-2000-SR-008

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.