#process
4 articles
01
·Engineering Process·★ MEMBER·12 min read
The Craft of Requirements — Why "We Built Exactly What They Asked For" Fails
Why shipping precisely what a stakeholder asked for produces software that works and nobody uses. Stated versus latent needs, use cases, turning "fast" and "secure" into numbers, and a set of question templates that expose ambiguity on the spot.
02
·Engineering Process·★ MEMBER·10 min read
Estimation and Scope — The Cone of Uncertainty and How to Negotiate
Estimates miss because a question about a range gets answered with a point. The cone of uncertainty, three-point estimates, why buffers don't add up the way you think, reference class forecasting, and how to turn a deadline conversation into a scope conversation.
03
·Engineering Process·★ MEMBER·9 min read
Architecture Decisions — Telling Apart What You Can Undo From What You Cannot
How to separate the design decisions you can cheaply reverse from the ones you can never take back. Measuring reversibility, writing ADRs that record what you gave up, and a template for putting trade-offs into words — from first principles.
04
·Engineering Process·★ MEMBER·9 min read
Upstream Work in the AI Era — When Code Gets Cheap, What Gets Valuable?
When implementation gets cheap, which parts of the cost remain, and what becomes expensive by comparison? We put the relationship between deciding and reworking into an equation, then design specs for AI as lossy compression of intent — starting from zero assumed knowledge.