“All of the methodologies that can be considered "top down" are the result of our desire to have a rational, systematic way of designing software. This paper brings a message with both bad news and good news. The bad news is that, in our opinion, we will never find the philosopher's stone. We will never find a process that allows us to design software in a perfectly rational way. The good news is that we can fake it.“
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6312940
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TL;DR; Focus on documentation
“The process is "faked" by producing the documents that we would have produced if we had done things the ideal way…The documentation is our medium of design and no design decisions are considered to be made until their incorporation into the documents.”
Wisdom from 1986
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And a great quote to end it: “Those who read the software documentation want to understand the programs, not to relive their discovery.”