That sounds more like a unclear or misunderstood requirements issue to me. But I may be missing your point.

I have worked too many projects where the ongoing answers from client and management were I am not sure what I want .. but that's not it Individual developers should never have to deal with requirements which leave them unlcear what they are supposed to do. And they should have some process to allow them to push back if they find themselves in such a situation

On the other hand a lot of the code I have written has been at least to me and the teams I worked with, relatively new territory with very little available prior art to build on ... not much you can do there but trial and error somtimes. Or cases where the delivered specs for somthing you had to interface with were just flat wrong in one or many critical points.

This may explain why I am a firm beleiver in an interative development process 8^)