Thank you for a wonderful post. I agree with you in principle. I just wish I ahd worked for more peopel who understood it and that it worked that way more than occasionally. Unfortunately the sernior management often sets requirments that are incompatible with the task at hand. Too often the programmer on the front line is left without the luxuary of good design or project management

As a result, saddly, I have spent most of my career fixing/completing/or redoing projects that were planned in depth to meet the requirements of one software engineering paradigm or another. Often my work had to be done much too much seat of the pants to suit me, as the decison makers panicked. I have had to rescue projects that were so OVER planned that they were documented to the interrupt level from preliminary specs for hardware that had never been seen. Software designed to the pseduo code level by 'software engineers' who had never been involved in any portion the design and implementation of a programming language (this project was to build a gas-oil pipeline control system) ... there was NO test code written. The spec wasn't even finished by the time the customer started court action. But it was detailed and in depth and all but worthless. While this was the worst I have seen it is not the only one by a large margin.