It's What We Miss in Software Development That Hurts Us The Most
The absence of requirement is not evidence of absence
“Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence” Carl Sagan
It's what is missing or what we don’t understand that hurts developers the most. The missing requirement can break your design. The missing NFR (performance, capacity, speed) can fail your software.
The focus on software development teams is creating software with what we know, but the missing requirements can cause you more pain.
Software development is about looking for the traps and not walking into them — Embrace Admiral Ackbar To Identify Traps in Software Development. Too many developers see the traps and walk into them, anyway.
Absence of evidence
Junior developers — What can we see? What do we know?
Senior developers — What can’t we see? What don’t we know?
Christine Finn’s article, Absence and Evidence, gives an example of absence of evidence.
For years middle-eastern archaeologists puzzled over the numerous, isolated bath-houses and other structures in the…
