Effective Software Project Management

Appendix D. Requirements Gathering

In most management problems there are too many possibilities to expect experience, judgement, or intuition to provide good guesses, even with perfect information.

—Russell L. Ackoff Management Information Systems scientist

Appendix Learning Objectives

After reading this appendix, you will be able to: Understand the significance of wants versus needs Describe what managing customer expectations really means Know what a requirement is and how to gather requirements Understand the role of the stakeholder in requirements gathering

Note

Most of the material in this chapter is an abridged version of material discussing gathering requirements from my earlier book Effective Project Management: Traditional, Adaptive, Extreme, Third Edition (Wiley, 2003). It is presented here for completeness so that this book may be used as a text for an introductory course in software project management. For courses requiring more detail the earlier work may be used as a companion text.

Gathering requirements is one of the first and major places that the project can go wrong. This is the first opportunity to really explore what the customer needs as opposed to what the customer thinks they want. Completeness and clarity are paramount. There will be many cases where one or both of those will not be possible. That situation is discussed at length throughout the book. In this appendix the discussion is limited to the industry best practices for requirements gathering. ...