When bad software requirements happen to good people (2011)

How is that the fault of swaggerui?

IF you cant bill for feature creep on a contract get a new lawyer who can write out better contracts or walk away, some things are not worth the hassle.

You can get a contract for bespoke programming which includes such things as feature creep billing for just a few hundred, its not expensive but if its not written down, you dont have much of a leg to stand on if things ever had to go before a judge or some sort of arbitration unit.

If working in a team, there need to be documented standards for everything from the UX to the DB and everything in between. Its just common sense.

What always seems to happen is they say, “we want it for this much.” And you say, “that can’t be done… well, it could be done if we can assume all X are Y. Is that okay?” They agree because it means yes. Then a year later they realize that not all X are Y and they start renegotiating, like we’re just arguing about paint colors or bathroom fixtures instead of something foundational, like the footprint or number of floors or what city you built it in (we decided we don’t want to live in Detroit. Can we have it in St Louis instead?).

I have been wondering for a while if we should just never ask those sorts of questions, because they don’t know, we hear what we want to hear, they hear what they want to hear, and nobody has any idea what’s actually going on, and later we won’t look at how we got here.

This might just be me not keeping up with the details, as I pretty much lost all interest in development methodologies after eXtreme Programming 20 years ago. It's all the same, either waterfall or some rehash of the iterative programming models of the 1960es and 1970es. Hell, even waterfall is suppose to have iterative elements, most just skip that part.

Business want Scrum, Agile, whatever, because it allows them to change their mind, but they also want the deadline of waterfall development. Clearly some "pure" form of agile is better, if you care about the quality of the outcome. When you have deadline and fixed budgets, the idea that you don't truly know when you're done rules out anything but waterfall, where all requirements are to be laid out in advance.

Deadlines and budgets are why bad requirements happen. Almost no one is able to write good requirements, it's simply too difficult in all but the most basic cases.