I'm ++ this and it's thread. It's a good point.

As a developer it is your responsibility to make a good faith estimate and stick to it.
At first I read this and though "woah" but your explaination afterwords made it "ok".

I think, when it comes to developing web-related products, that a sign-off on specs is often quite hard to get. Sure, you can mock up sample report-pages (fyi: I write applications that are based on IE->Apache->mod_perl->Sybase.. so, "web related") and go from there, but that's never quite "enough". This column header needs changing, the math behind calculating that value is "right" but for this specific case, it's wrong..

I think spec signoff is do-able as long as the business rules in place are static.

We get a lot of the users with the "the report shows the wrong data, it's a report problem" mentality, when in fact, it's a spec change for a specific "rule" that was forgotten..

But, you are right. As long as you think CMA then you should have enough information to present to your boss(es) when they ask where/what/how long a project will be before it's done..

One4k4 - perlmonks@poorheart.com (www.poorheart.com)