[borski]

Engineering does not have to lie. All this takes is design and specification upfront, a well-defined feature set, and room for error.

Also, avoiding scope creep is paramount.

[pas]

What's the usual processing speed of a software engineer when it comes to reading through and understanding design & specification?

We found that usually either the documentation/specification/requirements are too fine grained (and then they then change all the time, but then there's no real effort/bandwidth to do change management on the specs), or they are not detailed enough, which makes the estimation process a useless guessing game on what might they mean by this or that.

[borski]

See, I would expect the engineers to pipe up and explain that. It takes collaboration to get it right, and it takes the engineers setting expectations properly for what they need to estimate accurately.

It’s a collaborative effort, not a one-way street, as with most things.

[BurningFrog]

“Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.” - Edward V Berard