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February 20, 2006
Requirements, requirements, requirements ...
I think anyone who has ever worked on a large-scale systems development project knows the problems. You start asking users what they want and need, and besides all of the problems that attend communications skills, and besides all the difficulties that users have determining (or remembering) what they want, there is the nagging problem of changing requirements.
When I managed the database portion on the IPAD project at Boeing, we put 70 labor years into requirements definition. Of course, while we were doing that, the airplane business moved on. Hence, 18 months into the project, when we had a requirements document that was ten feet tall (truly), many of those requirements were obsolete. The problem, of course, is that the obsolete requirements didn't just jump out of that 10 foot stack.
Posted by DavidK at February 20, 2006 02:42 PM | Permalink