Oh yes, another from No Silver Bullets:

“The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.”

You best believe. I love this explanation. For starters it unburdens the people tasked with spec’ing the software from having to spec something that’s actually buildable. In most cases those people are UI specialists and business analysts who technically don’t know the first thing about actually building software. How could they realistically be expected to spec buildable software?

So in taking a specification and building it into actual software, we are effectively debugging that spec. Nice. Are you getting this Andrea? You’re off the hook, sorry not off the hook.

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