Heroic programming is inadequate

Heroic programming have got connotations of Herculean effort by a developer whereby he assume all the roles of analyst, designer, programmer, tester etc to deliver a piece of software. The feasibility of achieving this feat declines rapidly as the project acquires complexity or size. Despite his desire to deliver and undoubted expertise, it is not humanly possible to understand and absorb the problem domain for a relatively large and complex project in a limited time. In fact, it is inconceivable that projects requiring many man years can ever meet the quality metrics of useful, usable, reliable, flexible, available and affordable software if accomplished without a proven development methodology as the potential for number of errors increases with size and complexity. Even for small system where the approach can work, it is questionable whether maintenance would not be an issue in the absence of documentation which is a by-product of a proper development approach whereby the deliverables of one phase are used in a subsequent phase, thus producing traceability