The serious study of the practice of how to determine the appropriate content of a
specification is a seldom-appreciated pastime. Those who have the responsibility to
design a product would prefer a greater degree of freedom than permitted by the con-
tent of a specification. Many of those who would manage those who would design
a product would prefer to allocate all of the project funding and schedule to what
they consider more productive labor. These are the attitudes, of course, that doom a
project to defeat but they are hard to counter no matter how many times repeated by
design engineers and managers. A system engineer who has survived a few of these
experiences over a long career may retire and forget the past but we have an endur-
ing obligation to work toward changing these attitudes while trying to offer younger
system engineers a pathway toward a more sure success in requirements analysis and
specification publishing.
