The Requirements vs the Analyst

I always wondered what the "Systems Analyst" job entailed because the job title just sounded so damn cool. Now that I've read Software Requirements by Karl Wiegers I have absolutely no envy for anyone with that job title, in fact I sympathize in the utmost with what must be one of the hardest jobs in the software engineering industry.

In his book Karl Wiegers goes into great depth and detail in an effort to outline the software requirements collection process, which many have touted as being the most important aspect of software engineering due to the fact that the cost in correcting flaws in the requirements left undetected scale exponentially later into the project. It goes into great detail breaking down the groups of users, differing techniques to elicit requirements from either users or managers, as well as the clarification and organization of these requirements into a comprehensible software requirements specification.

I've personally found requirements practice to be the absolute hardest part of software engineering. Not to say that working with other people is either undesirable for the average software engineer, but it is exhausting whenever the effort is to get a large number of people to agree on a single definition or interpretation of a business rule. The greatest tool that I found in Wiegers book was the 'education' concept. If time permits the ability to educate the users, managers, and all groups whom the finished product will be of value, is the greatest one has. Clear communication and education regarding the importance of precise requirements definition goes a long long way towards making the requirements gathering process bearable.

The ideas and processes I had in my mind whenever someone would mention "requirements gathering" involved a bunch of emails, hallway conversations, maybe a lunch or two, and possibly a meeting involving a few people. While Wiegers situations represent the absolute optimal situations given enough time and manpower, his vision of cooperation and communication between users and developers really would be a thing of beauty were anyone able to put it into practice.