alt Hacker News>As a development life-cycle model, prototyping acknowledges that our job is not to build a system, but to acquire knowledge.
So if there is any hope in making software development faster, we need to focus more on the specification part - to get it right faster.
Calling it specification makes it sound like someone knows what should be developed but didn’t put the time and effort to specify what they wanted.
In my experience, most people don’t know what should be developed. Even users don’t know if you ask them.
As the article outlines: you need to acquire that knowledge. And they’re many ways to do that. Talking to customers, testing with customers, having smart people who understand and care (!) what outcomes people want to achieve and so on.