I think you are correct in your conclusion that you can't communicate through the spec alone. Language just isn't exact enough to allow you to write a spec, hand it over the wall, and get a product that exactly matches what you wrote.

But that doesn't mean you need to look over everyone's shoulder, either. The middle ground is to have a good technical manager assigned to the project who checks in on the implementors periodically to see how things are going. They can answer questions and make sure that the developer is clear what functionality the software should have.

We have seen this issue manifest itself in code reviews. We'll show up at a code review for a few thousand lines of code, and have core design stuff be incorrect. The question there is: how did you get this far down the wrong path without someone noticing?

The solution, in our case, is our general rule that the technical manager should do informal code reviews every 500 or so lines of code. If things are going fine, it's a very cursory look to make sure the developer is going in the right direction. But if they are on the wrong path, much better to catch it at that phase.

So I think you do need to communicate throughout a project to make sure expectations and reality are in parallel and correct when they aren't. Written specs alone aren't enough because two reasonable, intelligent people can come to two different conclusions about features and implementation. The only way to resolve these early is to keep an open dialog.

In reply to Re: Design. Implement. Bug Report. by cbrandtbuffalo
in thread Design. Implement. Bug Report. by Tanktalus

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