[thelist] Specifications

Hassan Schroeder hassan at webtuitive.com
Tue Sep 25 13:39:45 CDT 2001


Chris Evans wrote:

> ...       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.

OK, my prior posting was written more from the "lone gunman" point
of view, and I'd agree that more structure is required for teams :-)

The *amount* of structure depends on the range of experience of the
team members, whether they've worked together before, and a lot of 
other variables.

> ...                                              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.

but the *degree of detail* that constitutes "good" specs is up for
grabs, and I'd say every individual or team needs to work that out
for themselves ...

YMMV :-)
-- 
H*
Hassan Schroeder ----------------------------- hassan at webtuitive.com 
Webtuitive Design ===  (+1) 408-938-0567   === http://webtuitive.com

    -- creating dynamic Web sites and applications since 1994 --




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