I've seen non developers try to write specs in whichever format they like: word, excel, drawings, hand written, in speech, mockup tools, anything. They decide exactly how they want to express their idea without any constraints. And yet, they always fail.
There are always too many edge cases they do not think of. They only cover the "happy path" and quite often not even that. Just take the email conversation from the article as example, they didnt even touch the subject of implementation and it was already jibberish even for a developer. You need someone to actually sit down and squint their eyes over something, do research and run some test cases for a few hours before these emerge. Once you start doing this you are already by defition a software developer.
I've seen non developers try to write specs in whichever format they like: word, excel, drawings, hand written, in speech, mockup tools, anything. They decide exactly how they want to express their idea without any constraints. And yet, they always fail.
There are always too many edge cases they do not think of. They only cover the "happy path" and quite often not even that. Just take the email conversation from the article as example, they didnt even touch the subject of implementation and it was already jibberish even for a developer. You need someone to actually sit down and squint their eyes over something, do research and run some test cases for a few hours before these emerge. Once you start doing this you are already by defition a software developer.