Responsive design phases

In the paper on responsive design, Groves and Heeringa define "design phases." They argue that each phase has a capacity. Once that capacity has been reached, i.e. the current design has exhausted its possibilities, then a design change may be needed.

A difficulty in practice is knowing when this capacity has been reached. There are two related issues:
1. Is there a statistical rule that can be applied to define the end of the phase?
2. Can we identify when the threshold has been met immediately after it occurs, or is there a time lag?

I don't know that anyone has done much to specify these sorts of rules. I would think these are generalizations of stopping rules. A stopping rule says when to stop the last phase, but the same logic could be applied to stopping each phase. I had a paper on stopping rules for surveys a few years back. And there is another from Rao, Glickman, and Glynn. I don't know that anyone has tried this sort of extension. But I think it is an interesting idea.

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