Comment by enugu

There is a tendency here to pattern match the advice in this article with frustrating experiences about office politics. But I dont see this as a post about politics.

Rather, what I got was that the spec is an incomplete description and there needs to be more inquiry into how the software is going to be used. This can require a little bit of 'going up the stack' to see how business need relates to the software requirement(single enterprise customer with a precise requirement, acquisition of new customer, software for some internal vision of CEO etc). Compare with a startup where one doesn't even have a spec and one is trying to find a product-market fit or when developers take sales calls and find new insights on how the software is actually being used.

A completely broken spec is indeed a failure in management process. But, in general, it helps a library developer to think beyond a library spec and see how it is being used.