Gathering Requirements is Hard

I just got out of one of "those" meetings; maybe writing for a few minutes will clear my head.

One of The Firm's employees has been voicing her dislikes about a particular application that a contractor created a couple of years ago, so we wanted to meet with her to find out exactly what is the problem. The problem is that the application does exactly what the developer was told it should do. But it doesn't do what they expected it to do.

This cartoon is a great illustration of this problem.

Requirements gathering has become almost an art form because it's incredibly difficult to get people to accurately describe what they want. In fact, I think most people would agree that gathering requirements is the single most difficult (and important) phase of the software development life cycle. If you build something the customer doesn't want (even if they said they did), you've wasted everyone's time and money.

So how do you know when someone's accurately describing what they expect out of a new software system? I don't know! I was hoping you would! Gathering requirements is hard!