> "If we spend the time to make it do this useful thing, we won't get to that other useful thing until it is no longer as useful as it would be if we did it ear

> "If we spend the time to make it do this useful thing, we won't get to that other useful thing until it is no longer as useful as it would be if we did it earlier" In a discussion regarding process and requirements this type of analysis doesn't always make sense. The team is obligated to follow the process, because someone has determined it's really important. So that's that then. If you work under process with controls, like in safety critical/security systems, which use "safe" software processes, there may be reasons you are completing this work. Those reasons are often legal, or to reduce blame and liability. They might be anticipating that they will need to supply certain information in the case of a lawsuit, or that they will get in trouble for not having completed all the homework, which includes requirements. Even taking this out of the picture and purely looking at merits, there's a reasons we gather requirements. Without deciding what something does, how will we prove that it accomplishes these goals? How do we know what a product actually does? It can also be really valuable tool from an ethics standpoint. Having requirements makes it harder to sneak content in. It should be impossible to add content without consideration. This is actually a massive issue, with scandals and fingerpointing, that arguably shouldn't be possible, because we all agreed on how this will work. There's also some amount of bias built into time management. People are really bad at judging the "usefulness" of something, especially when it requires them to do something they don't like. Why let the developer of an important system decide what makes sense for them, likely based on their own agenda, instead of demanding they decide how everything works, and then prove it? So we decided you need to do this important thing, you decided you thought it wasn't very "useful", and didn't do it; now someone's dead. How do you explain this? Those decisions you made based on "usefulness" look pretty absurd when you're not following the ISO process, as expected.