Dear Jeff Sutherland, should we return to Enabling Specifications?

Dear Jeff Sutherland, you wrote about Enabling Specifications in 2012, a form of agile software requirements.

They were no more than 5 pages for a major global feature, could be elaborated into a backlog of stories, were flexible enough to accommodate โ€˜conversationsโ€™, and perhaps most interestingly, were recognised by US patent law.

Enabling Specifications sound amazing, and you wrote about them fondly, and yet they never made it into ๐–ณ๐—๐–พ ๐–ฒ๐–ผ๐—‹๐—Ž๐—† ๐–ฆ๐—Ž๐—‚๐–ฝ๐–พ, nor have become commonplace since. Iโ€™m not entirely sure why.

Would you care to elaborate?

If I had to guess, I would suspect the agile movement at the time backed the ‘placeholders for a conversation’ approach instead.

Fast forward 13 years, and apart from some far-flung corners of the software development industry, I see a distinct absence of conversations; instead, many, many teams are struggling with the entire idea of โ€˜agile software requirementsโ€™.

Should we be returning to Enabling Specifications, Jeff Sutherland?

Woking, Surrey, GU22, United Kingdom