The Developer’s Lot

I’ve been reading some technical specifications for parts of a client’s web site that we are re-designing. I’ve read (and probably written) some really dire specifications in my time, but these are worse than even I’m used to seeing. Have a read of this clip, randomly sliced to my email this afternoon (specifics removed to protect the guilty):

The criteria that (accessory a) can be ordered only when atleast (product a), (product b)
would remain the same with the (accessory b) being added into it. So now, the 
(accessory a) option should be shown only if atleast the (product a), (product b)
or (accessory b) is to be shown and is in stock.

If this is the logic (and the command of English) that the hapless developers had to deal with then it’s perhaps not surprising that the website is chaotic, slow and variously broken in parts. But weigh that up against the fact that the client has also been spending £50,000 a week just to keep the site running, fix bugs and generally maintain it, and things really start going through the looking glass. Of course, they had the misfortune to be conned into deploying the site on BroadVision, which can hardly help matters.