Software Requirements and 6 Thinking Hats
When in doubt: challenge the dodgy software requirements feature!
Writing software requirements (specifications) is a tricky business. On a project, there is a key role for that job: Business Analyst. They interact with the Business side and the Technical side. They are the bridge between two quite separate worlds. They are under tremendous pressure because they need to explain to one world what the other one wants. This requires, in the first place, understanding what the Business really wants. And sometimes, answering that basic question is difficult. There are several possible reasons for that. We could mention: difficulty to translate the business into computing routines; the difficulty to express without ambiguity a process that requires some level of human judgement, the business persons capable of telling what is needed are rarely available, there is no clear requirements process in place, the requirements capture format is fuzzy and not properly used, etc. But in this article we will study only the simplest one of them: The business may very well be simply unsure about what it wants. At the start of a project, it is quite common to make a long list of needed features. In this list, there are items that are obviously truly needed, and some are actually far less obvious.
I remember working on projects where some requirements were considered as mandatory, essential. One could not live without them. And when I was asking the simple question: who needs them? I could not get any answer. So, I then ask: who captured them? Still no answer. Nonetheless, someone, one day, believed it was a very nice feature indeed.
In some other cases, time is essential. The project must be released at a specific date. [...]
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