Running away from writing functional specifications is a common thing. We prefer to talk about them. When someone joins the team, people from various areas of the project are asked to have a chat with the newcomer and provide her some insights.
However, these discussions have a tendency to repeat themselves in time and also change in a few ways, leading to chaos.
Writing functional specifications helps. Joel Spolsky shows how in a 4-part series, which may look daunting to read due to the length, but it's basically a 30 minutes lecture and it's fun and useful.
Why don't people write specifications, even for a small tool they built, that can be reused and that can clearly state what's going on? The invoked reason is always the same: no time!
This is the Catch-22 of functional specifications: people don't have time to write/maintain specifications, because they have to spend time explaining to their colleagues how things work. And they do this, because there are no up to date specifications.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
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1 comment:
Great post and I mostly agree with your points. However, I think there are lots of situations where writing functional specs is the wrong thing to do.
If you're interested, please review my post and leave a comment:
http://johnfmoore.wordpress.com/2009/03/14/read-it-here-first-the-functional-spec-is-dead-or-should-be/
I'm sure we'll have an interesting conversation.
Thanks,
-John
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