Value of design documents (was: New TECHWR-L Poll Question)

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Donald Le Vie reports: <<I've had training and experience with NASA's
specification development methodology (from the Software Assurance
Technology Center), and their methods/templates can be extremely rigorous
for obvious reasons. >>

<g> Maybe they used to be, but the program seems to have been renamed
"Software-Hardware Assurance For Technology". As the press have maliciously
noted, Hubble and several recent Mars missions seem to have gotten the
SHAFT.</g>

<<Specs can be developed in formal language, but very few people who must be
able to read and understand the spec will be able to do so as formal
language is strongly mathematical in nature. Instead, specs are developed
using natural language to facilitate the understanding by all parties of the
requirements and contractual obligations. The problem with natural language
is one we deal with every day: it introduces ambiguity, inaccuracy, and
inconsistency.>>

Witness the problem with choice of units of measurement that sank the Mars
Explorer probe. Maybe it's time for someone to take that formal language for
spec development and make it a little more usable by common mortals, as was
done for SGML (resulting in HTML)? Sounds like a nice project for someone
with expertise and time. Maybe STC could fund it?

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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