New Zealand (South Island)
Seth Kenlon is a UNIX geek, free culture advocate, independent multimedia artist, and D&D nerd. He has worked in the film and computing industry, often at the same time. He is one of the maintainers of the Slackware-based multimedia production project Slackermedia.
Authored Comments
Nice! Yes, I think the concept of a "specification" is almost more valuable than the concept of "documentation" for many customers. People find it pretty easy to ask "why would you want to write documentation first?" but for some reason "let's write a spec so that what you end up with is what you're seeing in your head" sounds more like good service.
Very cool story! I think the concept of 'requirements' has somehow shifted, lately, possibly due to the prevalence of closed source, off-the-shelf software. How can you list requirements for software *first* if all you know is how to compromise? The greater industry has trained users to settle for, in this order: 1) whatever has the snazziest marketing campaign, 2) whatever can be shoehorned into their workflow, and 3) whatever more or less approximates what they actually need.
Most of us have forgotten that software is called "soft" because it's meant to be malleable enough to conform to our needs. Hopefully open source + good documentation will remedy that.