A great article by Eric Sink on Requirements.

Requirements are one thing my current project is lacking to a high degree and it really sucks. 

What’s worse about the current situation is that the client plans on taking this product to market and yet no matter how much we try to educate them, they continue to plod on in the same haphazard manner (which of course frustrates the development team, which in turn frustrates the PM because he doesn’t see what the big deal is). 

So, looking Eric’s article, I can say “Yep, yep, yep, and yep” to the bullet points under the “Bad Requirements” section.  My project has Missing Requirements, Unclear Requirements, Non-prioritized requirements and missing anti-requirements. 

Requirements come to us in the form of the PM saying, “the client wants X and he wants it by next week.”  My typical response back to him is, “well, it would have been nice to know that WEEKS ago when we implemented W, because X is building on W and W was never designed to work that way, this change is going to .”

 Sorry for venting…it’s been a frustrating few weeks and I”m looking forward to wrapping this project up.