Post #790297

No well-defined upfront specification survives contact with reality. In the early part of my commercial software adventures there was one occasion where a manager forgot to update the well-defined specification. The well-defined specification had apparently taken a large organization multiple years to produce. And so I spent however many months writing to to the wrong specification. But it's not just about having the correct version of the specification. There were plenty of other occasions where I had the correct specification, but when the software was tested in a realistic scenario the specification was found to be unworkable. For any non-trivial problem, believing that you can make a perfect upfront specification by putting in a lot of effort never really works out.