Hey Denny.

As in all things, the exact time varies a bit, just as an iteration may be anywhere from 1-4 weeks. The variation has to do with things like the complexity of the requirements vs complexity of the design, the difficulty of getting agreement with the stakeholders on the requirements, the degree of hw/sw co-development, the kind of work items being addressed (function vs quality of service, versus defect repair vs risk reduction spikes vs technical (e.g. architectural) work items), the degree of parallelism in the development (e.g. architects working more-or-less independently than developers), and so on. In general, though, the planning bit for the iteration is 1/2 -1 day, the requirements analysis for the iteration is 20%, the architecture is another 20%, object analysis 40%, mechanical and detailed design together accounting for another 20%. and then a day or two for V&V. In parallel, preparation for V&V and on-going continuous integration is being done as well.

So the largest single bit of the effort is usually the object analysis/High-Fidelity modeling bit, but this can vary. Sometimes a bit technical work item is performed that sucks up more effort; I've seen this when developing custom communications protocols, for example.

Does this mesh with your experience?

- b