I think the main thing missing in the discussion is organization or team size. Given that the author is a CompSci researcher for the past 40 years he may not b

I think the main thing missing in the discussion is organization or team size. Given that the author is a CompSci researcher for the past 40 years he may not be in touch with the reality of how organizations are structured and the impact of that on software development. If it is a start-up with 5 people, the software probably is the specification. If it is a large organization of devs (25, 50 or 100 people), then you will see more documentation, some of that specifications. There is likely a threshold in the number of people where the number of communication paths between them is too large to rely on informal ways of communication. Maybe its 15-25 developers. The larger an organization is the more bureaucracy gets introduced and you now have people whose role is to write specs and requirements docs, etc.