SAIP: The World Wide Web

Relationships to the Architecture Business Cycle:

By their nature, research organizations tend to generate projects from the bottom up more often than commercial organizations do, because they are dependent on the researchers' originality and creativity and allow far more freedom than is typical in a commercial organization.

Freedom. That is the major difference that I have noticed among all the case studies presented so far. The WWW was created based on a series of requirements but none of them were really detailed yet. After all, this was the first time something like this has been done before so you have to rely on your creativity in coming up with new solutions. This makes the problem more interesting. And since this really wasn't a commercial effort, there weren't that many bureaucratic procedures to go through.

This has been the most interesting case study because it actually shows the evolution in the implementations of a working system. Moreover, since it is a case study on the WWW, it is easier to follow since most of us are already familiar with the terminology. But more importantly, it avoids the heavy discussion of all the stakeholders, quality attribute scenarios, tactics and all the other procedures that the book had mentioned so far.