Requirements

[Jim Barrow]

As the software project that I'm working on creeps in scope, I have a simple question about gathering and developing business and functional requirements:

Do you think developers should be involved in this process?

The developers that I work with have been conducting "requirement" meetings that, in my opinion, resemble design meetings.  They're taking 'chunks' of functional requirements and turning these into technical specifications.  The problem with this is that they either dismiss some requirements altogether, or do their own interpretation and come up with a specification that misses what the end-users want or need.

Today, the developers are headed to a business unit to gather their own business requirements.  The problem with this, as I've seen them do before, is that the end-users aren't very adept at expressing what they need in 'software' terms, and the developers can't analyze worth beans.  So a typical session with end-users goes something like this:

End-user: "We need to be able to see the status of a task in real time."

Developer: "You need a portal that can do a single sign-on."

End-user: "Um...okay."

But I digress.  The question remains, however: Do you think that developers should be involved in this porcess?

Thanks,

Jim