Discovery

Discovery is the phase before building, spent establishing what should be built and why: understanding the users and the process being replaced, agreeing what success means, examining the systems to integrate with, and finding the constraints that will shape the solution.

It exists because the expensive mistakes in software are made before any code is written. Discovering in month four that an integration is impossible, or that the process being automated works differently in the second office, costs far more than the fortnight that would have surfaced it.

Its output should be concrete: a scope somebody can disagree with, a list of the risks and what was decided about each, and an estimate that can be defended. A discovery that produces only a document nobody refers to again was a delay, not a phase.