Countering arguments against specifications

I’ve encountered various reactions to specification documents over my years in the software industry. Usually, people’s reactions are positive, or at least hopeful. Most people would love to have a clear description of the feature under development, but between changing priorities and a lack of time, specifications can be challenging to produce in practice. Other people are more actively negative and argue for spending valuable project time elsewhere. As you can tell, I am firmly in favor of specifications, so here are some anti-specifications arguments and some counterarguments against them.

“This feature is too small to be specified”

Sometimes, a feature is so small that it hardly seems worth writing a specification for it. If a feature is obvious and everyone seems to know what it does, why spend the time writing that down? Some changes are so small that there seems to be nowhere for surprises to hide...