Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise

Chapter 12. Requirements Discovery Toolkit

With Don Widrig¹

So, ummm, how many undiscovered ruins are there?

—Anonymous tourist, winner of the “stupidest question asked by a tourist award,” Mesa Verde, Colorado tour guides

In Chapter 6, we introduced the user story as the primary carrier of customer requirements through the value stream. Assuming your system is already in use and you have access to users, that may be all you need. If you don’t know what the system needs to do next, you can always just ask them.

However, that simple explanation makes light of a significant challenge in software development, which is how teams should go about understanding—on a more systematic basis—what problems their solution is intended to address, what markets ...