[anon321321323]

Ah yes. That horribly failed project back in the day. Quoted 8 weeks to generate a requirements document and particular experimental prototypes for certain narrow areas to explore those requirements. Allowed two weeks for requirements gathering. The rest was then expected to be cycles of requirements and prototyping. This was all readily spelt out in the contract.

I made the mistake of using UML. They argued about lines and shapes of the sequence diagrams for around 3 days. Then it was fonts. Then it was colors. They wanted images. They wanted all sorts of nonsense in the diagrams. But the actual content? Apparently not so important.

Three weeks passed without a single line of code and the requirements gathering still wasn't complete or even approaching a first draft. I aborted it before this project had a chance to go into actual development which was the next stage and a separate contract. I learnt many valuable lessons. Including the wise counsel of having a contract with exit clauses. Thank you to the lawyer who wrote it up at relatively minor cost. The same lawyer who apparently was a waste of time according to colleagues at the time. Colleagues I later abandoned when they made other stupid decisions. Always get contracts verified by legal representation. Sounds obvious. But apparently not.

UML wasn't actually the issue. I just lacked the crayons and experience to stop what would later come to be termed "bike-shedding". Because the diagrams etc were "human readable" it was deemed that anyone could have an opinion. So they did. Repeatedly. Ad nauseum.

Later projects went better when I limited the size of requirements gathering and who could make changes. Experience built up and my BS detector got a lot better.

But I kind of didn't mind UML as such. I actually prefer waterfall. Real waterfall is cyclic and resembles agile. But no one ever does it that way. They think it locks things in at each stage and the deliverables are like unchangeable stone tablets from on high. Ugh. So painful when done that way.