Where I work, people don't like to write specs. (Boy, does anyone?) So they don't do it, unless forced by their bosses. If they are forced to write them, they make them as short as possible. (By the way, they also includes me.) This results in specifications like This software logs the time between event A and B to the event log Name ...
Hi, Yes we all get a warm and fuzzy feeling when we read about project specifications, and how they help keep a project on time and within scope etc etc. Who here actually works for a company that keeps and up-to-date specification? If you do, what are the reasons for this? Is the primary reason that you have a large team? ...
Can an HTTP GET legally contain content? The idea would be to put the request fields in as URL encoded content instead of in the URL to leave the URL clean in a web application for which I am going to be refactoring the resources. I suspect it's not allowed, but the spec at W3C didn't seem to say. EDIT: A post is expected to semantica...
One of the items in the Joel Test is that a project/company should have a specification. I'm wondering what makes a spec good. Some companies will write volumes of useless specification that no one ever reads, others will not write anything down because "no one will read any of it anyway". So, what do you put into your spec? What is the...
At my job we put some elements of the design for graphical user interface in both the functional specification and the technical design documents. However, this is often easy as nearly 100% of the time we are making modifications to existing software. What would one do if they wanted to produce a separate document for GUI specificati...
Can anybody clarify if Microsoft has released a [draft] specification of C# 4.0 yet? If so, where can I find/download it? ...
I've never written functional specs, I prefer to jump into the code and design things as I go. So far its worked fine, but for a recent personal project I'm writing out some specs which describe all the features of the product, and how it should 'work' without going into details of how it will be implemented, and I'm finding it very valu...
I'm developing a use case document for a somewhat large piece of software a small team and I are planning to write. While I've written requirement lists before, I'm interested in formalizing my process as much as possible. This isn't because I'm trying to be unnecessarily enterprisey, but rather, I think some time could be saved with a...
Does anyone happen to know what the maximum length of a method name is in your programming language of choice? I was going to make this a C# specific question, but I think it would be nice to know across the spectrum. What are the factors involved as well: Does the language specification limit this? What does the compiler limit it to?...
This question is inspired by Jon Skeet's answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/431091/is-there-a-c-equivalent-to-cs-access-modifier-regions#431105 He makes a comment that it is possible for the order of fields in a file to matter. I am guessing that this has to do with the order that the fields are initialized, but I think it's a d...
I'm currently working on a project which will support multiple file writing specifications (imagine if you had to support something like XML 1.0, XML 2.0, XML 3.0, etc) called ADIF. Currently there are two standards (version 1.0 and version 2.2.2), and they are both used commercially and both still heavily used. Specification version 2....
I don't mean "Basic SQL", but strongly the specs and the difference between the specs and the implementations between great databases (like SQL Server, Oracle, etc). ...
It would appear as though the only way to get the current version of the Java Virtual Machine Specification is to take the Second Edition, merge in the Existing Changes and then add on top of that the Java6 proposed changes which are not really proposed anymore, but actual. Really? Two question arise out of this: Is that all the delt...
I'm writing some tech specs and I'm looking for a lightweight editor that will help with this. Currently, I am essentially repeating five formatting functions over and over: Normal Text Code Example Annotation (e.g. "TODO: reword this later") Headings Smallprint (inline reference to Func Spec section) Can anyone recommend a lightwei...
How to identify where the Excel file use Excel 95 or Excel 97 specifications? i.e., which version of BIFF they uses. ...
I'm looking for a source/spec that can tell me what CSS properties can applied to which HTML elements. For instance, the css property; "overflow". I know I can apply this to div, p, textarea but what other elements can I apply this too? Is there a spec somewhere I can reference? ...
So I have a problem. Or rather my friend has a problem, since I would never write about my company on an internet forum. At my friend's company specification writing is, shall we say, a little underused. There's a deeply ingrained culture of writing code first and asking questions later, whether it's for a library routine or a new tool ...
Hi All, I am looking for CLI specification. Where can I find it to download? ...
I need some advice on how to resolve ambiguities within application specifications. As one simple example, When a user fails to authenticate after a number of times, send a notification to IT. In the above example, it is not clear how many times "a number of times" is. It is not clear and I cannot simply set a random limit like 100...
Your project owner gave you a spec, and asked you to provide an estimation for that. You gladly complied and gave him a figure. You charged in terms of work/ hour. But when the project was almost near to completion you realized that you misread the spec and forgot to include a large functionality into your estimation. If that functional...