Someone on Slashdot commented and said that they're company has 2 phases for developing software. The initial prototype phase where the hackers get to use whate

Someone on Slashdot commented and said that they're company has 2 phases for developing software. The initial prototype phase where the hackers get to use whatever tools they need to write the software, just to get something out there. The point is to figure out the specs based on that and then once they do that, once they have the scope of the software determined, then they can just write a spec and feature list out and hand it over to the engineers who turn the prototype into an actual product (with documentation, full-scale test suites, etc.)