Specs Are Boring
I've discovered why I'm lacking motivation for our Software Design Document at work. It's tedious. It isn't the creative part of the effort. It's boring!
The trouble with boring design documents is not just that they're boring to write, they're boring to read as well - so noone does.
In our most recent round of design documents at Ephox, we took some advice from Joel on Software and started injecting humor into the docs. So instead of just anyone inserting a table into a document, now it's Miss Piggy creating a table of Kermit's good and bad points - complete with a picture of Miss Piggy and Kermit. At one point we actually had half the engineering team rushing off to read the specification documents just so they could laugh at the stories.
Behind the humor though is real user actions, requirements and UI design, just done using a more interesting setting than "the user".
February 8th, 2006 at 8:13 am
If only…. I suggested this approach and it got shot down. :( When I get my company off the ground, you bet I will have a fresh look at the whole design doc issue.