For those interested in Information Theory, David Mackay has also written Information Theory, Inference & Learning Algorithms. The style is similar – clear, accessible and rigorous. It’s also available as a free PDF. Although it took me all of two minutes to order the dead tree version from Amazon.

This is entirely opinion of course but I have a feeling that if someone could study how people go about feasability analysis in regular commercial software, big company internal software, defense and mission/life critial software and startups that are either bootstrapped or have little cash, you’d find some very interesting ways people do these sanity checks.

My hypothesis would be that the bootstrapped startups do these checks a lot more than anyone else, followed by mission/life critical with a precipitous drop everywhere else.