Ovid, I agree with you completely!

My 'regular' job just (and I mean just this past week) decided to add Perl as an accepted language, so all my 'projects' thus far have been without actual specs.

But my larger problem is all the side work I do with a friend who runs his own ISP/hosting service. I can't remember one project on which I have worked that actually had complete specs. One project had something defined at the start, but then came the rolling-requirements, and just as I was ready to deliver phase one, things changed. And they continued to change. And grow. That wasn't fun. Now I get things like "I need you to look at some logs and tell me the security problems," or some such thing, with a snippet of a log file and nothing more to go on. That's a big help.

I don't know where I am going with this except to say that I absolutely agree with you, and have already stated that any future projects need firm requirements and specs before I will start them. I have wasted too many hours and lines of code, and with a growing family I just don't have all that time to waste any longer. It hasn't helped so far (the logs thing was two weeks ago), but I am generally an optimist.

D a d d i o