10 Software Spec Mistakes That Cause Production Incidents (With Fixes)

After 12 years in B2B SaaS — and too many postmortems — I've noticed that most production incidents trace back to a decision that wasn't made in the spec. Not a coding error. A specification gap. Here are the 10 mistakes I see most often, what the symptom looks like, and how to fix each one before implementation starts. 1. Acceptance criteria that can't be tested Symptom: QA closes the ticket as "passed" but the feature behaves differently than product expected. The mistake: The user should see