Re:Microsoft to shut down Wunderlist in favor of its new app...
by VladimirGolovin on Thursday April 20, 2017 @10:37AM
(#14156997)
Writing a good spec forces you to think through what you're developing in an orthogonal way.
(OP here). This. A thousand times this.
Re:Microsoft to shut down Wunderlist in favor of its new app...
by trashabout on Thursday April 20, 2017 @12:54PM
(#14158422)
Did you follow any standards when writing? I am currently looking for ways to document and model our process and business rules.
Re:Microsoft to shut down Wunderlist in favor of its new app...
by VladimirGolovin on Thursday April 20, 2017 @02:10PM
(#14159228)
I just wrote well-structured, dense, coherent / "mentally type-checked", bulleted-list prose, often copied directly from Workflowy. Some of the critical parts were described with FP-style pseudocode, for greater exactness.
Re:Microsoft to shut down Wunderlist in favor of its new app...
by trashabout on Thursday April 20, 2017 @04:06PM
(#14160342)
thanks!
(Not the OP.) At least for me, emphatically yes.
From your question, it sounds like you're only considering the communicative value of a spec. That's of course important, but I consider it secondary.
Writing a good spec forces you to think through what you're developing in an orthogonal way. You're thinking through flow, cohesiveness, design, some implementation, UI, etc. together at a high level.
I love having the time to write a spec when I'm building something nontrivial. I've found numerous problems that I wouldn't have otherwise by doing so, ranging from simple UI problems/contradictions to spotting unconsidered assumptions that would have lead me down dead ends.
A spec and the application should naturally co-evolve during development to some extent. But the spec also provides an anchor for what you're doing, as well as a map. It is very, very helpful if you Do It Right(tm), no matter the size of your team.