From day 1 in engineering school and beyond, people are taught that analysis must precede design. Every major successful piece of engineering I've seen or participated in has been approached in this way. A few that I've seen, and even been involved in, that were otherwise, have been abject failures.

Engineering is a specification task. It's not done by inventing technology. The first things that's taught in Engineering 101 is that engineering is the art and science of solving mankind's problems with existing technology. Engineers leave it to others to invent things. They don't, as a part of their routine tasks, hang around the lab making sparks and smoke. Engineering is figuring out what has to be done and how to go about doing it.

For projects as small as most MCU tasks, it's not necessary to go through the entire top-down A-spec, B-spec-, C-spec cycle used by large corporations, for such things as satellite design, and without which those big projects would probably fail, but it also explains why so many open-source projects are most-often inadequately documented, and, in fact, inadequately understood.

RE