Banging your head on DOORS
JetSetJim, "...they (should have) wrote the requirements..."
Oh lookie. Another naive person that believes in Requirements Management. It's so cute.
Allow me to explain why...
Code is at least an order of magnitude denser than requirements prose. A given paragraph of Requirements 'Shall' poetry might result in just a small part of one line of code. So if you have 'a telehone book' worth of code, the associated Requirements bible should amount to an encyclopedia set of volumes spanning a meter of shelf. Nobody can afford this. Nobody, except perhaps the Flight Safety software on an aircraft.
That's why the myth that is 'Software Design By Requirements' is so monumentally idiotic.
Program Managers that insist on using this approach deserve to fail.
(As noted above, please do use DOORS Requirements Traceability on Safety Critical systems. That's the sort of use-case where it's clearly worthwhile.)
PS: DOORS is an IBM tool. When is the last time you saw huge volumes of fantastic code pouring out of IBM?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
