18 October 2009

Fresh Perspective: Specifications

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! מזל טוב לתאיר לרגל האירוסין שלה !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Last time I wrote about documentation, I was huffy and annoyed.

Not today.

After posting a link to Joel on Software, I followed my own advice and started reading everything that caught my eye there. And there was a lot that caught my eye.

Notable for today's post are Joel's preachings on functional specifications. Reading them made me think again about what a good spec can do for me, the developer. And my teammates.

The upshot of this is that I am (voluntarily) writing a quick spec of what I expect from a particular functional module in the project. Our original monster document never clarified how the end user will accomplish his goal via interactions with the system. But before we can come out with our long-awaited initial version, we need that clarification. Everyone seems to have a different idea of how the interaction should go, but I think that a good spec would enable us to discuss our ideas in a clear format.