Having this general design in-hand and signed off on by your audience will prepare you for the unavoidable eventualities of users who are dissatisfied with the product or claim that the product lacks intended features.

That sounds you're preparing for war with your customers from the outset. Don't go there! Expect that they'll change their mind about things, and be prepared to adapt. Part of being prepared is being light on your feet with documentation, to minimize that amount you'll need to change when new requirements come in and you have to make changes.

If you're concerned about schedule dissatisfaction, prepare a short document for each change request that recaps the changed requirements, and details the consequences (in terms of schedule and resources) of the changes. Get the customer to sign these.

Or better, engage your customer more frequently, and have them help prioritize the list of what they want to see next. If you're following one of the Agile methodologies (e.g., XP), you'll be in a position to "release" fairly frequently. Giving the customer the chance to reprioritize lets them change their mind, and greatly reduces the chance of them coming back at you with a "this isn't what we wanted!" argument.

In reply to Re: Re: Design Documents? by dws
in thread Design Documents? by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.