Requirements Gathering
By Allen Holub
September 15, 2005 —
(Page 1 of 2)
At the center of the design process is the notion of “requirements gathering,” but I think the entire notion is misguided. There is no such thing as a “requirement,” at least not in the way that most programmers or marketing people use the term. The only real requirement is that the program solve a real problem that vexes real users, that the program provide answers to specific questions about the real world.
When you focus on gathering discrete “requirements,” you focus on the minutiae: menu items, dialog-box contents and the like. All too often, the big picture—the problem that you’re trying to solve—gets lost and the program is a failure. It doesn’t actually do anything useful.
When designing, I think about problem definition, not requirements gathering. If presented with a specific requirement, I always ask: “Why do you need that? What task are you doing or what problem are you solving that would be made easier were that requirement implemented.” That, is I focus on the problem itself. The methodologies I use don’t use requirements lists. Instead, they use two documents that look more like essays than bullet lists.
First, a “problem statement” defines the user’s problem and any solution to that problem that can be expressed in domain terminology. It doesn’t describe a computer program; rather, it focuses on the real-world problems of the users. For example, I’m currently working on a system that solves problems associated with secondary-school administration—grant management in particular. The problem statement describes how the grants are administered, not how the program will look. In fact, words like “computer,” “system,” “database” and “user interface” don’t even appear in the problem statement. The audience is a school administrator, not a programmer.
The second piece of the puzzle is “use-case analysis.” The use cases define the tasks that the user has to perform to solve the problem you just identified. Like the problem statement, the use cases are defined using the vocabulary of the users, and are written in the context of the problem. They don’t describe how you might use a computer program; they describe how you solve the problem at hand. How do grant administrators set up and administer the grants? At the core of the use-case analysis are the activities that the user performs, and the sequence in which the activities are performed. There’s even a UML diagram for capturing this information, called an activity diagram.
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