When I worked as a technical architect, I would never dream of letting a project go into development unless we had carefully specified the loading (e.g. transactions per second) and the data metrics (e.g. no. of records) that the system had to deal with. This makes sense because then the developers can do their unit testing to those figures (with allowance for the inherent optimism of humanity), and the testers can test to those figures. Then the project can be signed off as being fit for production service.

If you don't have those figures, how then can you DBAs specify the hardware, or produce/cost out the Service Level agreements? How can you developers do unit testing? In my example, the company hadn't really thought it through, but we very quickly had all those figures calculated and the hardware in place. I think that my response to those who don't have a proper specification of the system is just to express huge waves of sympathy. I feel your pain. You're more firefighters than developers, or DBAs