Team Skill 2 Summary

In this team skill, we've described three pervasive "syndromes" that increase the challenge of understanding the real needs of users and other stakeholders. The "Yes, But," "Undiscovered Ruins," and " User and the Developer" syndromes are metaphors to help us better understand the challenge ahead and to provide a context for the elicitation techniques we developed.

But since teams are rarely given effective requirements specifications for the systems they are going to build, they have to go out and get the information they need to be successful. The term requirements elicitation describes this process, in which the team must play a more active role.

To help the team in this mission, we've described a variety of techniques that can be used to address these problems and better understand the real needs of users and other stakeholders:

• Interviewing and questionnaires

• Requirements workshop

• Brainstorming and idea reduction

• Storyboarding

And there are others as well.

Although no technique is perfect in every circumstance, each represents a proactive means of pushing knowledge of user needs forward and thereby converting "fuzzy" requirements to requirements that are "better known." At this stage of development (or at this particular software iteration) that is a significant accomplishment.