Planning Smarter: Creating Blueprint-Quality Software Specifications

5.2. A Developer Focus

Over the few decades that software development has been around, a protectionist climate toward developers has drifted in like a deepening fog. In the current climate, the developer is seen as a risk, a liability, rather than as an asset. There has been a growing tendency to view the developer like a factory worker who will most likely botch up the widget unless his damage potential is curbed through strict and inflexible assembly line processes.

Even if you were to argue that the need to eliminate mistakes during planning is mostly intended to protect the developer from bad specifications, not out of any lack of trust, that position still reflects a lack of trust. It reflects the assumption that development cannot produce ...