Comment by ebiester
4 hours ago
This is a particular artifact of the government system process. These are contracted pieces of work that Company A would deliver, Company B would administer, and Company C would be contracted out for additional work. Further, all specifications were created ahead of time because changes would cost extra. (Anyone who has done government contracting can talk to the shenanigans involved with it - I have not lived in this world for a long time.)
That said, we still do ad-hoc versions of many of these. For example, a system/segment specification today is an OpenAPI document between microservices. Most larger SaaS companies have the equivalent of a Software Configuration Management plan - Who can change terraform or a GHA, what are the standards that they conform to (linter, peer review standards).
> This is a particular artifact of the government system process.
Yes, a government process meant to implement the waterfall approach.
If you look at Dr. Royce's paper which originated the concept, he was very explicit that it required upwards of thousands of pages of documentation to be written up front, if you were doing it "right".
By the time the required documentation had all been written, there should be essentially nothing left to do but to actually type out the punch cards as specified and turn then into a system of compiled programs.
Now, this appealed to government because it put documentation in place that was felt to be more viable for contracting processes, but ever since Dr. Brooks chaired a 1987 Defense Science Board study on the issues already facing the DoD trying to implement waterfall methods, they've been trying to restructure their software acquisition methods to pursue better outcomes rather than more concretely defined outputs.
Of course it's still a tremendous challenge for them even now, and it remains common to see defense acquisition projects that will say "Agile" to the right people even as they prescribe a full waterfall-style 'system engineering V' approach behind the scenes.
The ad-hoc responses that the commercial space often involves is usually more appropriate, believe it or not. They get process added when process is helpful, but not before it is helpful.
Indeed, I came across this not as a contractor but in my university textbook :) I wanted to collect the document list that forms the "thousands of pages" mentioned above in the waterfall model.