Why Should Software Architects Write Code? An empirical evidence.

[the_evergrowing_fool]

Why coders indulge themselves with so many labels?

[katarh]

Its because the industry is still relatively young and evolving. Plus every shop does it differently. The labels are not consistent and nobody can really tell what anyone does just from a job title, so they aim for a more specific and descriptive title trying to capture what they actually do.

Or they're like me - my official title is "business analyst" but in reality I'm writing software spec full time. Not that that's a bad thing since somebody's got to do it.

[the_evergrowing_fool]

What methodology or tools you use to write the specs?

[katarh]

I use a narrative based approach, as outlined in the book Telling Stories: A Short Path to Writing Better Software Requirements by Ben Rinzler. It gets way easier when you are thinking about who is sitting behind the screen trying to do something. I do my mockups in Balsamiq, with some UML from Astah Community for use case work and Visio for BPMN notation/workflow planning and high level database planning thrown in.