Some of the original requirements began to “evolve” as a result of the interaction within these weekly meetings. The group demo sessions often led to a brainstorming of ideas that would make the program even more effective.
Dr. Newberry would help them out by giving them suggestions or by trying a few things himself. He would run the program as if he were a student in the class and try to make certain things work. Sometimes he would run into some problems and ask if certain things should be fixed or improved. The students would then respond yes, no, or maybe, depending on what they felt confident in doing or what would fit into the amount of time they had left. As a result, JLS development followed an iterative process that would add to or take out different items in the list of stuff to do.
Dr. Newberry interview 6:45 (audio link)
…that interaction has been very useful and of course, you know, it generated some new requirements here and there as they turned up. But most the new requirements were fairly small things. I never said, “Oh, redesign this whole thing.” We never had that issue come up. Most of the things were small tweaks, small additions.
I would usually ask them, if, you know, “It would be nice to have this and does that seem like a big deal?” And sometimes they’d be, “Yeah, that’d be pretty hard” and sometimes they’d say, “No. We could do that. No problem.” So we kind of negotiated that process. And I enjoyed that.
Glad we didn't just have to come up with a set of requirements on one day and then at the end they’d come back and say, “Here. Here is the delivered product. The interaction and evolution of the project was very nice. It went very well as far as I am concerned.