Re: Requirements

[Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au>]

Jim Barrow said:
 > So a typical session with end-users goes something like this:
 >
 > End-user: "We need to be able to see the status of a task in
 > real time."
 >
 > Developer: "You need a portal that can do a single sign-on."
 >
 > End-user: "Um...okay."
 >
 > But I digress. The question remains, however: Do you think
 > that developers should be involved in this porcess?

Yes, definitely, but depending on the developers they probably shouldn't 
be the ones driving the process.

In Jim's example I suspect that a TW or a person experienced in 
gathering requirements would write down something like:

    Requirements
    1. Need to be able to see the status of a task in real time.
       (poss. impl: portal with single sign-on?)

The developer might well write down:

    Requirements
    1. Need a portal with single sign-on to view tasks.

The crunch comes when the developer delivers a prototype that features a 
portal but which makes it difficult or inefficient to do what the users 
really wanted. Users are dismayed; developers fume that users don't know 
what they want, always change their minds...


I would also expect the person running the show to ask more questions to 
pin down exactly what the users mean.

- who would need to check the status of a task and in what situations?

- What might they do just before checking task status?

- What would they do next if the status is active? pending? successful?

- What do you mean by real-time?

... and so on. Knowing the context of the requirement helps you 
understand how it fits into broader sequence of tasks. You wouldn't want 
to implement this task view in isolation and then discover it takes 
users another 11 mouse clicks to get to a different part of the system 
where they take some action based on the status of a task. (At one place 
I worked the testers and I referred to one of these as the "at this 
point, scribble the ID on a Post-It and stick it on the monitor" step.)

Stuart
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