ambiguities in the development process

[Mark Wieder]

Kay-

Tuesday, April 28, 2009, 12:37:12 AM, you wrote:

> I would suggest that a small portion of the alpha/beta/post release
> patch cycle is destined to discover the ambiguities that the creators
> of the original extremely accurate tech specs never envisaged.

...with a change of topic...

I worked on a system a dozen or so years ago where we spent roughly
the first 60% of our development time (some 8 months or so) hammering
out the requirements spec. The direct opposite of modern agile
development techniques. But the result was that we got almost all the
ambiguities out of the spec so that at the end of that process all
three stakeholders (development, QA, and documentation) could build
their deliverables from the same spec in parallel. With the tweaking
of weekly bug meetings to discuss the few ambiguous issues that had
managed to sneak through, we delivered an award-winning java app
pretty much on time and pretty much on budget.

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net