When The Joel Test first appeared, one of the biggest sore points readers reported had to do with writing specs.
People claim that it's because they're saving time by skipping the spec-writing phase.
They act as if spec-writing was a luxury reserved for NASA space shuttle engineers, or people who work for giant, established insurance companies. First of all, failing to write a spec is the single biggest unnecessary risk you take in a software project. They are terribly unproductive. They write bad code and produce shoddy software, and they threaten their projects by taking giant risks which are completely uncalled for. The most important function of a spec is to design the program .