The blog nicely classes the problem as being too heavy-weight during
final stages. The quick discussion thread seems focused on adding a
moment at which the draft specification is considered 'baked'.
I think that's still too late.
Certainly it could be useful, but it's still very late in the process.
Specification development usually does -- and certainly ought to --
formulate basic design ideas or approaches that motivate the details in
a specification. A good specification will include discussion of this,
and I think the typical and most significant hashing and re-hashing that
happens in later stages is about the design issues.
While basic design revisions can happen at any time in a process, I'll
suggest that a specification effort should be asked to document its
interesting design choices early, and circulate /these/ for external
review, iterating later if basic choices are changed.
I suspect that an earlier exercise at summarizing functional goals and
design approaches and issues will have a number of benefits, beyond
enabling earlier external review.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net