The first step in any kind of software development project should be to determine what the software needs to do. In order to determine that, we need to fully understand the problem. This is the core of what requirements gathering is about.

Think back to the story problems from your early days of math:

If a train leaves station A heading west at 66 miles per hour, and a second train leaves station B at 44 miles per hour, when will they meet?

How would you solve this problem?

You really can’t - not without gathering more information. How far apart are the stations? Did the trains leave the station at the same time? What direction is the second train heading? Are they even on the same track?

The need to thoroughly understand the problem holds true for software development as well. If you begin building a project before you understand what it needs to do, you are setting yourself up for failure. Think back to your early days as a computer science student - did you ever start programming a project without reading the full assignment description? And did you ever find when you did read the last parts of that assignment, the program you had been writing was incompatable with those requirements?

Key Terms

Some key terms to learn in this chapter are:

• Requirements gathering
• Stakeholders
• Formal requirements
• Business requirements
• Functional requirements
• Non-Functional requirements
  • Hardware
  • Software
  • Performance
  • Usability
  • Cultural Sensitivity
  • Availability
  • Reliability
  • Maintainability
  • Extensibility
  • Security
• Feature