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90% of everything is crap. That's Sturgeon's Law.
Software is not excluded from this principle. We live in a mass-market,
low-bid, first-to-market world. Our goal ultimately is to be less sucky
than our competitors.
A
written spec is key to giving an organization the flexibility to grow.
Without it, adding new people to a project requires that the existing
engineers take time out to bring the new members up to speed. This is
the mechanism behind Brook's Law ("adding people to a late project only makes it later"). .
But a good set of project documentation can temper the effects of Brook's Law and provide some scalability...
So,
if you don't write a spec, your name will be cursed in languages
unknown to you in far away countries, and also by kids in middle school
today when they try to figure out your code 10 years from now.
- Rob Weir (he's in the Dark Matter of Technology at Lotus/IBM)
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