Hey Jeff - but not that Jeff! Great response. I agree completely except for one point. You say “I hear developers whine all of the time about crappy specs”. Now, I’ve worked in just about every kind of job you can find in an RD department so I have been a whiney developer, a sloppy spec writer, a tyrannical project manager, an ivory towered architect and I’ve dabbled in dreaming the impossible dream (product management) and I’m sure I’m missing some other stuff too. Heck, I’m even one up on Tolkein and McConnell in that I’ve done some technical writing that was fiction.
That said, when writing specs it was my honest opinion that many of our developers whined about the specs being incomplete if the work being spec’ed sounded boring, would require them to overhaul their existing Objects’ d’Art, force them to interact with their peers or bothered them religiously. By whining and demanding “clearer specs” they could delay the odious work and hopefully have it dropped due to deadline pressures. On the other hand, if what was being spec’ed seemed interesting or fun, they were quite content to charge ahead with even the most minimal of specs (especially if the specs were so minimal they could interpret them however they wanted).
Now, before everyone thinks I’m bashing developers - program managers and product managers and QA people were all quick to bash the developers and often wouldn’t initiate conversations with them because they would have to step outside their own comfort zone in trying to understand the technicalese. PMs would spec stuff that was very expensive or quite possibly NP-complete and get frustrated when the developers said “it can’t be done”. Of course, there was always the boy who cried wolf syndrome to be considered since the developers had already cried “it can’t be done” three times already.
Peter, you’re bang on too.