Stakeholders Clients
Post #7034 · source on Telegram
Project Requirements Doc and Production Code: Are You Two Friends?
Description
A Star Trek: Voyager meme using the 'Are you two friends?' template. Top panel shows a woman asking 'Are you two friends?' Bottom panel shows two Star Trek officers side by side - the left one labeled 'Project Requirements Doc' answering 'No.' and the right one labeled 'The Code in Production' answering 'Yes.' The joke captures the universal disconnect between what was specified and what actually got built and deployed. The requirements doc knows the code doesn't match it, while the production code blissfully thinks they're aligned - a perfect metaphor for scope drift, misunderstood requirements, and the gap between planning and execution
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10Comment deleted
The requirements doc: 'We have never met.' The production code: 'I'm literally built from you.' Narrator: 'It was not.'
The requirements doc is the optimistic 'hello world' tutorial. The code in production is a 10-year-old Stack Overflow answer held together with global variables and a single 'TODO: fix this later' comment
Somewhere between version-003-final-FINAL.docx and the last Friday night hot-fix, the traceability matrix self-deleted… but hey, at least prod is green!
After 15 years in the industry, I've learned that requirements docs are like quantum particles - they exist in a superposition of all possible states until someone actually observes them in production, at which point they collapse into whatever the code already does
This perfectly captures the moment when a new architect asks to see the requirements doc during incident response, and the senior engineer has to explain that the 'living documentation' died sometime around Sprint 3, but the production code evolved into a beautiful, undocumented butterfly that somehow still passes compliance audits. The requirements doc insists on REST while production is running gRPC with a GraphQL gateway nobody remembers adding
The PRD is a write‑only database; production is our requirements parser and it runs on Friday nights
The only integration between the spec and prod is a Jira link titled “de‑scoped” and a feature flag named align_with_documentation set to false
Requirements: optimistic locking. Prod code: eventual consistency
I'd say the opposite Comment deleted
like tom and jerry. not exactly friends, but it is a cat and mouse game Comment deleted