Spent a big chunk of today writing the specification for a little program that Peter and I are writing. The customer was rather surprised to discover that I was going to spend around a third of the development time writing the spec. I'm quite happy to do this though, because it is how you get a happy ending out of a project.

I'm documenting exactly what the program will do, what all the inputs and outputs are and who will create and use them. As I go I'm assembling a list of questions for the next customer meeting (the Word comments are great for this and customers hate it if you keep ringing them up) so that when we start writing proper code we can just turn it out with no guesses or worries about bits we may have missed out. Oh, we might still miss bits out. But because the customer will sign the specification, at least we won't have to put them in for free.