Project Definition

Nothing frustrates you and, ultimately, your customer as much as an ill-defined or non-existent specification. Let's see what happens when your client provides a typical project or design specification:

 Poor Prior Planning?

Does your prospective customer appear to understand what they're supposed to be building? If a developer is so confident of her or his unique skills, the end result is almost always (in the case of software) sloppy code that frustrates schedulers, defeats testers, and confuses customers. Other than this, there’s no problem…

 Question: Who Can Do This?

Does this satire of a project kick-off meeting look familiar in any way?

 Results

Just a few questions…

• Poor Testing
  • How can testing ensure that the product satisfies the business goals?
• Poor Documentation
  • How can anyone adequately describe a product developed with poor specifications?
• Poor Customer Satisfaction
  • If customers cannot understand how to use your product, they’ll find another solution.