I was working with an older gentleman who's job as a project manager was to document the software requirements for a small project started in the engineering department. The purpose of the project was to develop a small software application to store and track various sampled statistics.
The older man's approach was to document all aspects of the project with voluminous documents, where each word, verb adverb etc had to be meticulously selected. This approach totally frustrated the younger engineer who was the sponsor of the project. My older gentleman friend was ultimately let go (he was a contracted project manager) because the young engineer could not stand the older man's approach.
I was so embarrassed by this failure, even though I did not directly contribute to it, that I put in the back of my mind I would spend the remainder of my career trying to understand this very strange "requirements" phase and see if I could learn how to do this correctly.
This led to ultimately creating my own company called Software Requirements, Inc. (www.softreq.com) which specializes in requirements management, requirements tool selections, etc.
Future posts will be a walk down memory lane. How were requirements gathered in the 1980's, the 1990's and the 2000's. And finally "where are we now" and "where is this going".
Please enjoy!
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