Requirements Come Before the Contract
Until the schema is declared, changing your mind costs one paragraph. 👋 Hi, I'm Anton — a software engineer working mostly in PHP/Symfony and Go, currently carving a live PHP monolith into Go services. This series is about the order the work happens in: what has to exist before anyone writes a line of code, and what that order is actually worth. This part is about the first links of that chain —…
Before any code is written, the order of work matters. The first link in that chain consists of a wish and the requirements that emerge from it. When a requirement changes, it only takes editing one paragraph. Downstream, the same clause affects five artefacts: the requirement itself, the generated code, handwritten code, tests, and documentation. The focus is on the change being coordinated, rather than attaching hours or money to it.
The case study presented is a boring one: a form that nobody decided on. It was never explicitly stated as a requirement, so each author decided it locally. An audit of a service tree on 2026-08-13 found 44 copies of four different forms. The case shows that requirements matter because they are the only artefact that exists before any editing occurs.
Once the contract has been declared, the same clause impacts five artefacts, including the requirement itself, the generated code, handwritten code, tests, and documentation. The key is that the requirement serves as a condition that can be checked by a machine, ensuring consistency after everyone involved has forgotten the conversation.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
