I’m working on a project in which some of the deliverables are specifications. I haven’t written many documents that would properly be termed ‘specs’ before, so I’m learning a good deal from the experience.<\/p>\n
One thing I was just pondering is that if one works for the goal of making a ‘complete’ spec, one is assuming a waterfall model of development (Wikipedia: Waterfall model<\/a>, Why people still believe in the waterfall model<\/a>), which is bad. In real life, a spec is a sort of snapshot of a continuing process, which is therefore not ‘complete’ (unless your philosophical orientation says that a thing is always complete in itself by its own definition).<\/p>\n This does remind me, though, of one of the complaints one often sees about consultants. One way to relieve the tension between completeness and a continuous process is to construct a shiny veneer of completeness, then take the money and run before the process comes back around to show the holes in the veneer.<\/p>\n Of course, it’s necessary to choose some point at which to exchange artifacts for money and call it “done enough for now”, so maybe it’s all in the attitude.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m working on a project in which some of the deliverables are specifications. I haven’t written many documents that would properly be termed ‘specs’ before, so I’m learning a good deal from the experience. One thing I was just pondering is that if one works for the goal of making a ‘complete’ spec, one is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[12,15,27,39],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-business","tag-consulting","tag-information-technology","tag-ponderings","author-admin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}