In the System Engineering context, to “bootstrap” is to bring order out of chaos through the application of (perhaps) ad-hoc processes. It may, for example, be necessary to strongly tailor requirements derivation practices in order to tease out a customer’s preferences and priorities. Our typical goal is to limit such practices to a project’s “startup transient”, so that we’re operating with predictable processes before too many people have joined the program.
Some SE practices provide frameworks that can be used to elucidate important topics and parameterizations so that they can be operated on with standard processes. For example, certain aspects of the “House of Quality” and the “Analytical Hierarchy Process” perform some of these functions1. Most of these methods are some variation on the concept of the “Delphi Method”, which is often fiercely disparaged in the SE community.
Footnotes- They can, unfortunately, also be carried to excess.[↩]