This accurate observation is nearly 40 years old.
“At the project level the desire to have a process model that provides management accountability inhibits designing a process that most managers will admit is the way it really happens...The hallmark of management accountability is to assume that you know what you are doing and to present a set of milestones that indicate you have a clear understanding of how you will reach your objectives.”
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/41765.41776
Mastodon Source 🐘
It's not code, it's understanding:
"The conclusion that stands out most clearly from our field study observations is that the process of developing large software systems must be treated, at least in part, as a learning and communication process...As a result, a large part of their role during the design process is to educate other members of the project team about the application, and to ensure that they [design team] come to share a common model of how the software system should operate."
Mastodon Source 🐘
Behaving as though people had perfect foreknowledge, while everyone realizing that's impossible…
Mastodon Source 🐘
People change their minds, refine their understanding, and external conditions change along the way:
"The problems most frequently cited with requirements volatility were of eliciting requirements from customers (even if the customer was an internal organization) and the evolutionary processes these requirements go through in the minds of customers throughout development...”