I read an interesting post on Mike Cohn’s blog entitled A Requirements Challenge regarding a meeting he had with Tom and Kai Gilb. In short, from what I can tell, it centers around the idea that, as software engineers, we hardly ever, if ever at all, build new functions, but that we inevitably end up improving the quality of an existing function.
I have to say that, after thinking about it for a while, I must agree, even though I tend to find it hard to wrap my mind around the concept. Essentially the idea is to move away from a developer centric design and focus on stakeholder satisfaction. What makes stakeholders happy is quality, not only function. More important than what a thing does is how well it does it. In other words you should adopt an attitude of creating “Quality Requirements” rather than just “Functional Requirements”. There’s a lot more to it of course, but that’s my understanding in a nutshell.
Read the blog, and especially the comments afterwards…
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