Home Remodeling and Requirements Elicitation

Two relatively different topics, right? Not so much it turns out… Recently, after a long weekend of remodeling our master bedroom, I was reminded how important the requirements gathering process is, even in everyday life.

After my wife and I painted and rearranged our entire bedroom, my wife decided to “de-clutter” the room (I would like to thank HGTV for this new concept). However, in the process, she didn’t ask which items in the room were important for me to have quick and easy access to. So early Monday morning when it came time to leave on a business trip, I couldn’t find my watch, or my passport.

Me: “Honey… where is my watch?”
Wife: “In the nightstand!” (she responded in a frustrated tone)

Nightstand? For my watch? Hmmm… Of course, I thought… (insert sarcasm here)

I quickly figured out that my wife made a mistake that IT team have traditionally made. She assumed that she could hide all of my personal belonging in the effort of de-cluttering our room. However, she never asked which of the items were important to me to have easy access to. So was this an ill-willed effort to make my life more complicated? Of course not – she just simply never gathered requirements from me (the end user).

So, before you attempt to bury that application functionality deep in a menu to make the screen look cleaner, make sure you talk to the folks that are using the system to see which functionality they need quick and easy access to.

And honey - the room looks great...