Requirements and Design

I have recently found myself on an engagement where the is no clear line between requirements and design. Both activities tend to bleed together which creates a level of requirements complexity and they quickly become unmanageable.

I have read many books on requirements (including my personal favorite which authored by a good friend of mine Daryl Kulak, Use Cases: Requirements in Context) and have been producing them for the better part of a decade now. In most of my reading, authors typically stand firm on the idea that design is a separate activity and should be isolated from the requirements creation process. I have found that most effective practitioners will also agree with this approach.

And, while I tend to agree with this as well, is this a stance that can be taken in all organizations? More importantly, is this approach feasible when working with a COTS package?

So, while requirements generation and documentation is without a doubt an art (vs. a science), how much "creativity" can be embedded in requirements without bleeding into design?

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...