Lazycoder

putting the FUN back into functional specs

Joel on Software – Painless Functional Specifications – Part 1: Why Bother?

It’s been about a year or two since I’ve written any functional specs. I had almost forgotten how useful they are. They force you to justify WHY you are writing code whether you are refactoring an existing code base or creating one from scratch.
My favorite part (I’m a sick man aren’t I?) is writing out the use cases/scenarios. By spelling out how your mythical end user will actually benefit from or use the code you will be writing, you think of other things that it should do. It also gives you the opportunity to say what the code should NOT do.