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Software Engineering

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    Solid answer. It wouldn't hurt to add that some of the time it's simply a matter of throwing a metaphorical dart at the wall and coming up with a guess. It can definitely be a very subjective process. Commented Dec 20, 2012 at 15:34
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    +1: Very good answer. It might also help to note that performance testing the software often indicates the hardware requirements. That is, it's less about "does it run" and more about looking at the perf requirements. If there is a requirement that an operation o takes < time t to complete, then whatever hardware combination that satisfies that goal becomes the min spec. Commented Dec 20, 2012 at 20:16
  • Just for thought, dev systems should normally be significantly beefier. Which means the developer seeing it barely crawls on his setup is unlikely to conclude the job's done. Unless, naturally, management was stupidly stingy. Commented Jan 24, 2015 at 15:14
  • @Deduplicator I could mention an recent employer that had devs on Dell 280s (flashbacks of running eclipse and jboss on there). Sure, that was the target platform too - but they only ran IE. Commented Jan 24, 2015 at 15:17