Bridging the communication gap

This is a great book by Gojko Adzic about the closing the gap between business users and developers – and builds on his Specification by Example work.

Specification documentation, even if not out-of-date before development starts, will change during development. This is the rule rather than the exception. Imperative requirements are especially problematic because they appear precise, but in reality they leave open implementation design decisions that introduce “mistakes” (or more precisely, differences in interpretation).

To add gravitas to my own opinion, I am going to borrow Bertrand Russell:

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realise till you have tried to make it precise (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism)

Leaving out the “Why?” when describing an application, by focusing on purely the “What?” and “When?”, means that arguably the best person to make informed design decisions (i.e. the developer) does not know the application’s intention to ensure ad hoc decisions keep the original overall aim. In other words, the success of the application’s development is down to pure chance.

The book goes into greater detail about solving the challenges and I would strongly recommend it; especially to anyone struggling to understand why quality application delivery is not necessarily delivering quality to clients.