[Haskell-cafe] Maybe off-topic -- Writing contracts or software specifications

[Maurí­cio]

Hi,

I'm an engineer, and as a programmer I'm just an amateur.
This easied things to me, since I could take decisions about
practices based on what made sense to me.  But now I need
to take responsability for some formal programming tasks,
and I don't know which examples to follow.

I need, for instance, to write a contract with a programmer
we are hiring for a task. But the only example I have of
such contracts seemed to me (as I said, an amateur. I may be
completely wrong) impractical. It was a 150 pages document
with every possible user action and every imaginable allowed
consequences. But it would be easier to me write the software
than such contract itself.

Are there ways already accepted by practice on how to write
software contracts? It's a small program to acquire and show
data from a device, a one person, two months work. I like the
guy we are going to hire, and much to my surprise he sugested
using Haskell for the task. But he also do not have experience
writing such documents.

Thanks,
Maurício