(Shamelessly reposted from Shamus’s Good Robot Devblog)
When you’ve got more than one person working on a complex bit of software, you generally need a specification (spec) for new features. The bigger the team, the more you need a spec. The more complex a feature, the more you need a spec.
According to stereotypes, big firms usually lean too hard on specs, to the point where they might spend more time writing the specs than coding the feature:
“The button will be ten pixels from the left margin and will conform to the usability guidelines sheet 201-a. It will be labeled “Join Game” and will – after a confirmation popup as outlined in the interface framework – begin polling the designated server in request for an open slot. If no slot is found, then the fallback behavior […]”
Meanwhile, little indie houses have a slightly less formal approach:
Bruce: Can you add a button that will let players join the game?
Barbara: Sure.
Stuff gets done either way, but sometimes indies are a little slapdash and sometimes big firms are a little too bureaucratic. On Good Robot, our spec is usually a sentence or two in the shared Google doc that we use as a universal to-do list.
But this week I ran into something that I realized was too complicated for that. It was one of those features that sounded obvious and simple in the meeting, but then became mysterious when I sat down to write the damn thing. (This is the point of a spec: To reveal the unknowns BEFORE coding begins. This is important in big firms, since once you’ve begun coding you’ve ALREADY been allotted a fixed time budget, which means this is a bad time to begin figuring out what you need to do.)
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