[thelist] Specifications
rudy
r937 at interlog.com
Tue Sep 25 12:36:17 CDT 2001
> Ummm, if your friends don't use a spec of any kind,
> how do they know when they've fulfilled the clients needs?
exactly, that's the "got to be done" logic
> Not to mention budgeting, timeframes, feature creep...
exactly, that's the "waste of time" argument
let me speak from the developer's point of view
(i'm sure martin will be along shortly to refer you to a
couple of articles from the project manager's point of view)
in a dilbertian sense, developing specs for something that
you don't end up building is dumb
so is creating specs that do not guide or help the developer
but useful specs can only be produced by someone familiar with
development issues
and useful specs require more than the vague generalities you
see in ppt presentations (e.g. "pages will be created that link to a
database of product images and information")
sadly, the developers are often the ones called upon to
produce the specs, and this interferes with the time they
have available for developing
it is a myth that you can stop the world until the specs are
complete
it is also naïve to expect client requirements to stay as frozen
as the specs were a few months ago when the project started
the best approach?
loose specs and involved clients, and lots of interaction with them
oh, and project managers that will back you up and translate for
you when you need to tell the client "this is not possible, and anyway
it's stupid"
project management, in my experience, is often "get as much work
outta them as possible" versus "estimate the hell out of it so i don't
end up working nights too"
what would be nice is software that allows you to design an application
and the software will spit out the finished code -- in this type of
scenario,
the specification and development efforts are one and the same
but you have to be a big rich corp to have software like that
rudy
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