Monday 19 July 2004

Programming the programmers

At some point in your life, you will probably need a computer programmer to do something, and you will need to be more specific than you think. Make sure that you say the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

If you make an assumption when telling a programmer what to do, you must, at the very least, tell the programmer that you have made an assumption. Consciously assuming, say, that report columns can be rearranged by the user, is a problem for the programmer, because we can't read minds. We can't read the documents you write to explain your requirements to us - how can we possibly glean extra information from your head?

The rule is this: if you think of a requirement that is obvious and need not be stated, write it down anyway. It's going to take you five seconds and save both of us at least a week of development time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Our project is now one year late because of "obvious" unstated requirements.
PPS - We hates them.

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