Programming from the interface
Comments: 2
If you’d been put in charge of coordinating a project to design and build a moderately complex web application and were beginning to despair not only of ever being able to build a strong consensus among the different departments who need to benefit from the application, but of how to even express that consensus in meaningful documentation, this article from Jason Fried of 37 Signals called Getting Real, Step 1: No Functional Spec would probably come as a bracing breath of fresh air.
Why, it might even solidify some very similar thoughts you’d been having, and the spark of validation thus provided could re-ignite those dormant cylinders on which you had not been firing.
Such an article could even be so meaningful to you in your present circumstance that clichés like “bracing breath of fresh air” suddenly seem achingly appropriate.
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Posted to General Rants • 2005.02.11 (Fri) • 15:41
Comments
Posted by Mary Beth 2005.02.12, 11:39
Whoa. Flashbacks to my dotcom days. Whoa.
Posted by Marc Fearby 2005.02.12, 21:31
I’ve noticed the very same thing in my development work. I start out trying to write a functional specification, but pretty soon, it ends up being an out-of-date bunch of paragraphs that I don’t update and nobody wants to read. Creating mock-screens gets ‘em going, but sadly, it still doesn’t eliminate “scope creep”. Nothing will!
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