Chapters
Eighteen chapters, four parts
Under each Part II chapter is the load-bearing assumption it audits. The badge is the verdict: holds, recalibrate, breaks or inverts.
Part I Foundations
Part II The Life Cycle, Audited
- 03Life-Cycle Models When Iteration Is CheapAssumes: Iteration is expensive, so phase boundaries and loop length are set by the cost of rework
- 04Requirements as the Primary ArtifactAssumes: Implementers fill gaps with tacit knowledge and ask when unsure
- 05Size Estimation: What Function Points Still MeasureAssumes: Product size predicts effort
- 06Cost and Schedule Estimation After COCOMOAssumes: Effort is a function of the size of human-written code
- 07Project Management and Where Value Is EarnedAssumes: Progress is measured by work completed
- 08Coordination at Scale: Shared Context vs. Shared MessagesAssumes: Coordination happens through bandwidth-limited messages
- 09Risk Management: Project Risk and Adversarial RiskAssumes: Risks have estimable probabilities
- 10Design for Change, and for AgentsAssumes: Maintainers can hold only part of a system in mind, so design knowledge must be localized behind interfaces
- 11Construction When Code Is CheapAssumes: Code is scarce; its author understands it
- 12Reviews: Inspecting Evidence, Not DiffsAssumes: Rates and checklists are calibrated to human authors
- 13Testing, Evaluation, and Tests as SteeringAssumes: Tests are written with intent independent of the defect
- 14Configuration Management When Agents CommitAssumes: Behavior is determined by versioned source, and the version history records how each change was produced
- 15Reliability of Nondeterministic SystemsAssumes: The program is fixed between fixes; execution is deterministic; failures are independent