The impossibility of communication

A couple of recent events have reminded me about the impossibility of communication, i.e. communication is never perfect and complete. There is always an "information gap" between two people, and the width of gap over which we can communicate varies depending on our shared experiences.

In software development, we need to remember that we can never write specification and design documents that actually explain what we mean. We have to assume the reader has a certain level of experience.

• the more experience the user has, the less we need to write.
• the less experience the user has, the more detailed the document needs to be.

You can never hand over a document and forget about it, all documents are merely a starting point for discussions. See Chapter 2 of Aliaster Cockburn's book, "Agile Software Development" for more details.