Why are specifications important for software and design?

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If you are in a rapidly evolving small company and the main concern is to make payroll, writing specifications are not at the top your todo list.  But building code against specifications are usually what you do, the specifications might be the work order that your customer agrees to pay you for your work effort. 

Or your specification that you need to deal with is the design guidelines for the Raspberry Pi you are working with to build that next new thing.  After all if you have an order for 200 software based toys that use the Raspberry Pi board, you need it to be the same size, connectors and BSP every time.  So we create and use specifications everyday as hardware/software technologists. 

The C#, C++ and C specifications are an example of software standards, which is a higher level of specifications with high level collaboration.

But beware that  everyone can participate.  Even you.  That’s right.  You.  Well, “You” if you are a small company with 5 members or less and making less than $5,000,000 Swiss Francs or $5,601,676.02 US.  You go to this site:

https://www.ecma-international.org/memento/join.htm

Then download the letter template at:

https://www.ecma-international.org/memento/Application%20letters/Application-for-SPC-membership.doc

And submit it, then if you are voted in, your company now can give feedback on ECMA standards like C#, or JavaScript (ECMAScript).

And that is why I have been writing about the various specifications: You can make an impact on how software is designed worldwide.  But if you want to do this, you do need to review the actual specifications.