[wefarrell]

Oh god you just brought back a memory from when I was brought in to manage a team at a dysfunctional organization and I was trying to figure out how a complex service was supposed to work. I asked: "Do you have any documentation or requirements", I was told "The code is the requirements", to which I responded "Wonderful that means there can't ever be bugs because there will never be a discrepancy between the code and requirements".

Getting requirements in writing was an uphill battle and the lack of requirements always wound up screwing over the developers because there was no contract to prevent scope creep and the developers were the ones that were held accountable for misunderstood features and missed deadlines. As a result everything was constantly rushed and not well thought out. It took me a long time to convince my boss that the issue stemmed from unwritten requirements and a lack of planning.

[spikej]

I'm going to steal your quote. I love it!

To add, how could they do any QA when testing needs to map to those unwritten requirements