Why we hate specifications
Written specifications (user stories or not), are a horrible way to convey information.
Regular people find it difficult to write specifications. If the following applies to you, you are within the definition of a regular person: Your opinion about Star Wars is limited to Star Wars, not individual episodes. You still don’t know much about cryptocurrency, and you find the Snapchat interface confusing. Incidentally, irregular people also find it difficult to write specifications. I know that fact made it evident that this entire paragraph could have been shorter, but the point is that it’s difficult.
But the main problem isn’t to write it in the first place. The main problem is that whatever you wrote isn’t updated during the exploratory phase that follows. By the time someone actually starts coding, everyone has moved on from the original specification. We can only hope no one reads it, because by now everything in it is wrong. To be fair, everything didn’t change. Some of it was wrong to begin with. And now the rest of it is wrong too.
Whoever wrote the specification almost died the first time, there is no way they’ll do it again. We all agree on what to do now, right? No need to go through that again.
Oh, and this is why outsourcing doesn’t work, because those guys actually do read the specifications. And then when they do something wrong you go “But we agreed to change that, remember?” and they go “But on page 34 in the specification it says..” and then you try to remember why you fired those in-house developers.
Also make sure you don’t miss Sigberg’s laws of documentation!
