Why can't they just admit it?

Anyone who says they know how to create quality software is either a) lying, 2) wrong, or iii) trying to sell you something.

We know - we've been here in the trenches, pulling our hair out, trying to get it right. BDUF? NDUF? Specs, no specs, bare specs, x-ray specs. Evolving design? Prototyped delivery?

No one really knows. Most typically, I suspect, they know what went wrong in their last project and have some Big Ideas about how they would've done it better. At most, they might know a few things that actually worked for them once before. At least these might have the added benefit of also being true.

I'm a data architect, so I intended this blog to mostly focus on data and SQL issues. But I'm always searching for that "higher process", that mythical "better way of doing things", so I tend to let myself get sucked into these ideological discussions. So what the hell, my first post is just a link to an interesting post on 37signals.com about specs.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives/001050.php

The 37 folks seem to be all about the XP/Agile stuff that seems to be all the rage with the kids these days. Who knows, maybe they're on to something. Lord knows I've seen my share of useless specs, and reams of documents that didn't move us one inch closer to the ever-receding-into-the-distance goalposts.

But I can't seem to bend my brain around the concept that the answer to poor documentation is none at all.

Reading through the comments, I was glad to see someone point out the novel notion that, hey, some projects are different than others. Web development is not the only development being done. Some projects just won't spontaneously reveal their True Nature through the clever use of drop-down boxes drawn on napkins. Some projects actually require some measure of ...[shudder]... design.

Of course I'm intentionally oversimplifying things. No one's advocating doing no design at all. But those of us who dabble in the information arts always get a good chuckle out of proclamations that "the UI is the app". We know better. We know that it's the data.

Everything else is just representation.