Why You Don’t Need a Specification Document Before Talking to a Dev Team

stanfy.com

3 points·ianatiev··2 comments

If the OP does product development like he writes articles then I too would prefer to gather the specs myself in long "conversations" with him. But concise writing is something one can learn:

In 8th grade we got schematics of a bird feeder and had to provide a textual description from which one could build that exact bird feeder. Time for the assignment: 40 minutes.

> If your mobile app or project is like the Iron Man in our office, I mean if it can be created in a very short time, then it might not be worth it to plan all things in advance.

"Replicate this image at 50x50 pixels with these stickers on that wall. Start 30cm below ceiling, align left side with that glass line." Nothing else needed, if one follows this spec it is impossible to do it wrong. Great task for the intern one does not like.

A complete specification does not need to include everything but only the bare minimum to describe the project so that the implementation provides exactly what was asked for. This in fact is what makes specifications good: It must be complete but concise.

In real life it is often more to extremes. Either nothing or details that do not add value at that particular case. One of many examples I saw was, when one small feature was described on 10 pages going deep into every single corner case and as a result - less than 1% of those was used. In such cases it just makes more sense to run it in short experiment cycles.

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