Thinking Methodically about building a PoC

[karim.adel at gmail.com (Kasper Adel)]

hi,

I am asked to build a large lab/test it. I'm provided crazy scale numbers
for lots of technologies (L*VPN, IPv*, IGP*, All Tunnels flavors...etc).

It took me a lot of time to build this lab, because when I got the
request/test plan handed over to me, I did not verify that these scaled
numbers are even possible, not to mention the combination. I assumed some
thought/research were done before.

I'm trying to put together a list of the lessons learned, and the right way
to do this for future reference, specially that this project was time
critical and I got beaten hard because I did not deliver on time.

So my question is, in your extensive experience, what is the right
method/approach to this kind of task:

1) Get started immediately (MVP), things will break, tune it along the way.
2) Do some planning and research first.

I'd appreciate any references to 'software engineering' or other industries/

Thanks