New Law

[acroyear]

Shelby's Law of Framework Foresight: When working with "the customer" to nail down exactly what things will be constant and what things will be variable in order to develop an extensible framework for their application space, the first thing they will ask you to do after the first deployment is change the most critical "constant" upon which everything is fixed.

Corollary 1: no amount of User Acceptance Testing will protect you from that law.

Comments

[thelongshot.livejournal.com]

Course, that is what a Functional Requirements Document is for to help prevent that sort of thing.

[tchwrtr.livejournal.com]

Strange, I thought the FRDs are what helped *cause* this sort of thing.

"Oh, we didn't mean we wanted fuzzy bunnies. We meant to say that we wanted green turtles. Can't you just change the spec?"

And so it is changed, and NO ONE TELLS THE TECHNICAL WRITER. Gr. Like we have hours on end to read/re-read/compare versions of specs.

[thelongshot.livejournal.com]

Technical Writer? What's that?

(Unfortunately, very true on this contract...)

[tchwrtr.livejournal.com]

Some days I get the feeling that if the FDA didn't require us, we would not be here. Or at least in the numbers we have--which isn't enough.