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> What do you do when asked to write about how a system WILL EVENTUALLY behave while ignoring what is actually does. Remember, the person asking you (an engineer or manager) has their job, and possibly an entire team?s or group?s, on the line.
The obvious strategy is to write about what the product WILL do, not what it IS doing. The reason has nothing to do with ethics, and everything to do with describing the product the customer will see. Some of us call this process 'shooting at a moving target' but it's an activity most of us have done at one time or antoher.
That said, however, it's important for you to get serious commitment from the developers as to what will and won't appear. If you're going to write what amounts to fiction and put your department's reputation on it, they're going to have to sign up for creating the features that support that fiction. In fact, if things are really political, you might have the development manager sign a statement to that effect, so that if they change the deliverable your department can always point to what they signed up to do.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing happens all the time, despite all sorts of efforts to get products nailed down before the final testing/review cycle. It's one of the frustrations of this business.
