chris97865

And most teams skip it entirely There is a craft tradition in architecture that says the drawing is the building. Not a representation of it. Not a plan for it. The building itself, resolved in a different medium. Everything that will later be wrong was already wrong on paper. Everything that will work was already working before the first foundation was poured. Software has always known this and mostly ignored it. The argument for skipping specification has always been speed. Why spend a week...

In 1966 a NASA engineer named Robert Propst published a study on the relationship between planning and construction cost in large infrastructure projects. His finding had been observed in shipbuilding, in civil engineering, in the construction of railways across three continents. A change caught at the specification stage cost a fraction of the same change caught during the build. A change caught after the thing was in use cost an order of magnitude more again. The numbers varied by industry...