The Myth of Rational Design (2010)

> All interesting design questions are left unresolved by the facile advice to make good decisions instead of bad ones.

This advice is not present in the paper. This is made up by the blog author.

This critique misses the punchline of the "Fake It" paper (not really a punchline, it's in the title). The punchline is that the Rational Design Process is not possible, but we can produce artifacts (namely, documentation) during and after the development process that reflect what would have been written if those processes were actually possible. This isn't even hidden. It's in the title, and at the start of section II (and the rest of section II describes why this is true):

> We will never see a software project that proceeds in the "rational" way.

They make an apt analogy to mathematics in the conclusion:

> Even mathematics, the discipline that many of us regard as the most rational of all, follows this procedure. Mathematicians diligently polish their proofs, usually presenting a proof very different from the first one that they discovered.

There is no perfect process that will produce a perfect product in one go. But we can document the product as if that process existed. Parnas & Clements take it as a given that such documentation is valuable, specifically for the programmers who will come to the project later. That part is debatable. But nonsense claims that Parnas & Clements expect people to "make good decisions instead of bad ones" is just that, nonsense.

https://users.ece.utexas.edu/~perry/education/SE-Intro/fakei...