Explicit Assumption

Intent

Compensate missing facts (especially requirements, goals, estimates, opinions) by explicit (usually written) assumptions about those facts.

Compensate missing facts (especially requirements, goals, estimates, opinions) by explicit (written) assumptions about those facts.

Description

Making assumptions explicit is fundamentally important to Capture Quality Requirements, so that development teams don’t need to rely on implicit assumptions or requirements.

When evaluating problems, risks or remedies, we often need to estimate or assume stuff like duration, cost, workload or others. These estimates or assumptions need to be made explicit, so that others can reproduce or understand our evaluation. In case of numerical estimation, it helps to apply Estimate in Interval

Also known as educated guess.

Related patterns

Capture Quality Requirements
Make the specific quality requirements of a system explicit.
Estimate Issue Cost
Find out how much a given issue costs in units of money or effort in a period or for every occurrence.
Use Invariants to Kill Zombies
Provide a safe approach in situations where it seems to dangerous to delete code or whole modules from a huge system because Static Code Analysis can’t recognize whether the code is still in use or not.

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