I once worked on a Finance project which had grand aspirations and decided it was going to Do Things Right by starting with extensive specifications.
The developers insisted on all behaviour being specified and documented before they would start coding. Of course, a truly exacting specification is equivalent to code. So the users who had been tasked with describing the required functionality ended up inventing their own DSL and “coding” the entire system in Microsoft Word.
Needless to say, they were the only ones who understood the spec. IT cried foul. Business cried “this is what you asked for!”
Cue months of arguments over what constituted a proper spec, during which the users essentially taught themselves how to code. The software eventually ended up being written by transliterating the DSL into actual code.
It worked, but remains to this day an unmaintainable mess.
The developers insisted on all behaviour being specified and documented before they would start coding. Of course, a truly exacting specification is equivalent to code. So the users who had been tasked with describing the required functionality ended up inventing their own DSL and “coding” the entire system in Microsoft Word.
Needless to say, they were the only ones who understood the spec. IT cried foul. Business cried “this is what you asked for!”
Cue months of arguments over what constituted a proper spec, during which the users essentially taught themselves how to code. The software eventually ended up being written by transliterating the DSL into actual code.
It worked, but remains to this day an unmaintainable mess.