[thelist] Specifications

[Chris Evans]

I wish I could dig up the actual resource, but I remember reading about a
competion held at one of the standard conventions, like Comdex, or
something.  The contest consisted of teams of coders given the same problem.
They were judged on completeness, creativeness of solution, and speed.  All
of the teams except one received the problem, and started coding.  One team
brought out a whiteboard, and spent 2/3 of the time designing the
application.  They won the contest by a wide margin.  All of the other teams
ended up starting code, rewriting, refactoring, arguing amongst themselves,
rewriting again, and so on.

Maybe this is one of those coding legends used as examples in textbooks, but
I thought I had the original article bookmarked.  However, I have found time
and again that getting good design specs written down ahead of time actually
saves time, though it seems like you are wasting it.


Chris Evans
chris at fuseware.com
http://www.fuseware.com