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This morning, Brian Ford and I headed over to Powell’s Technical Bookstore to pick up their one used copy of Code Complete, 2nd ed. While we both stood there reviewing the contents, I felt somewhat unsatisfied with the purchase that I was about to make. It then occurred to me that what I was looking for was quite different and while the programmer side of me felt the need to make the purchase, there was another void to fill. Requirements gathering, prototyping, use cases, and delivery are areas where I am really focusing a lot of my attention to. Brian and I discussed how Test-Driven Development solves some of the problems surrounding application development and Behavior Driven Development might pick up on some of that slack as well.. but what about the stuff that happens prior to sitting down to code these units of work? How do we define them? How do we extract meaningful requirements from the client and allow them to participate in a sign-off process where they confirm that they are confident that you understand what their problem is and that you have a clear picture of a solution? These are questions that I have been trying to answer for myself.

While talking with Brian during our walk to and in the store… a random Delphi developer that struck up a conversation with us about the Code Complete book we had in our hands and XP methodology. While listening to him, I noticed a book title, Mastering the Requirements Process, 2nd ed., which I picked it up and glanced at the table of contents and noticed the title for Chapter 5, “Trawling for Requirements.”

”...in which we drag the net through the work area looking for requirements, and discuss some useful techniques for doing so”

I was immediately drawn to the book at that point and decided to purchase up both books for the PLANET ARGON library. It’s written by Suzanne and James Robertson and published by Addison Wesley.

The book describes this figure with, “The overlap between Requirements Gathering and Systems Modeling varies as the development of the product progresses. Initially, very little modeling is done, and the majority of the effort focuses on gathering and verifying requirements. As development continues, the modeling activity expands to occupy a continually greater proportion of the effort.”

I’m really looking forward to diving deeper into this book and will share my thoughts on Requirements Gathering and how we’re doing it at PLANET ARGON. :-)