Instapaper works well for me (and it strips out the ads)

Yea, that's a "accurate communication is both parties' responsibility" thing. It would be great if we all would do it (I'll admit that I don't always do it either). Otherwise one party or the other (or both) is making an assumption... and we all know what that does.

Henry Minute wrote:

I would forever be in the situation of meeting 'fred' (who submitted a feature request a couple of days ago), in the lift or canteen, or wherever, and during the conversation we would agree some change to it. That remained in my head, it got done, but wouldn't be documented until the completion stage.

The difficulty, from the POV of proj mgrs, requirements writers, and others who work with developers, is that often the canteen-line conversation was stated as "is this possible," "how difficult would it be," or "how long would this take" and wasn't meant to actually be done. With that info, the non-dev has in mind conversations they need to have with the customer, then at some point the change would be put into a "real" request. Instead, *poof* the change has been made without anyone expecting it, and now there's much scrambling to be done. I'm not saying this is always the case, but I see it often enough that I try to be explicit - "I am NOT asking you to make a change, I'm just asking for information here." If you're having this sort of situation come up repeatedly in your org, perhaps a "do you actually want this change or are you just asking for information?" type question would help avoid it. Or not, depending on the personalities involved :| -S