In my former post about progressive elaboration, I promised some “examples” from different domains of software development. This is the first of these. As I said before, progressive elaboration is about acknowledging that we can’t know everything we need to get to done before we start.
One of the difficulties of requirements elicitation is to maintain a consistent level of detail, both in documentation and in our conversation with practitioners, subject matter experts, and individual contributors. Another typical difficulty is understanding whether requirements are sufficient to begin some subsequent activity like design or coding.
While some methodologies have made recommendations, most merely call out the need. This leaves it up to the requirements analyst to build their own practice. In fact, most analysts do not subscribe to any specific methodology that they practice. I have often used these interview questions for analysts that I expect to elicit and organize requirements for software applications.Continue Reading