It is fashionable to talk about requirements “discovery” today; “elicitation” is soooo last year, and “capture” went out with crinolines, darling. It seems to cover everything from writing the project plan to getting the requirements into a database.
But really discovering a new requirement is quite special. Moments of discovery are rare and exciting. They drive projects. They change businesses.
I have in front of me the bowl and neck of a clay pipe that I found the other day on the bed of the river Thames at low tide.
Clay pipe fragments discovered in the Thames
Two centuries ago, clay pipes were commonplace: men smoked tobacco in unglazed white ceramic pipes, made of fine ‘pipeclay’. The long, slender and delicate stems gave a cool smoke, and probably absorbed a fair amount of the tar, too. (Given that most people didn’t live to see their 50th birthday, the danger from diseases caused by smoking was negligible.) Clay pipes didn’t last long, as the stems broke easily. People routinely tossed the bits into their fireplaces; the ashes were then cleaned out and dumped in gardens or the river.
Francis Welch
(1744-1790) smoking a clay pipe
Portrait by James Earl (1761-1796)
It is easy to find fragments of this simple old lifestyle: cleaved bones of sheep and cow; shells of oysters in huge quantities; shards of pottery of all descriptions; stems of pipes.
But the pipe bowls are harder to find. One pipe might yield a dozen lengths of cylindrical stem, but only one recognisable bowl fragment. Sometimes all that is left is a tube that starts to widen slightly at one end, maybe with a few marks showing the start of an embossed pattern. Sometimes there is a definite T shape – often there was a boss below the stem as well as the bowl above. Occasionally you can see a dished shape marked with the lines where the parts of the mould met – most pipes were shaped by pouring clay into a mould. A few dished pieces are beautifully marked with leafy outlines from the better moulds.
Just occasionally there is a remarkably complete neck-and-bowl that has somehow survived the vagaries of breakage, being thrown out, the tidal flow of the river, burial, and re-exposure by dredging or digging or current flow, giving the discoverer a rare moment of surprised pleasure.
No matter that the object is green with filamentous algae, muddy, worn, and broken. It is a new find! It is exciting to examine it. Is there a pattern? Is it a real specimen or just a pebble, a piece of meaningless modern detritus? What can we tell from it? Ah, here’s an interesting specimen – see, when the hole was poked through, the tool left a mark on the inside of the front of the pipe bowl, which is very narrow. And this, look, a shard of a pipe bowl, I never saw one like this, it could almost fit into that one to make a complete bowl.
Research is said to be 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. Most other creative activities – engineering among them – are no different. Engineering projects have their moments, but mostly they are just hard work.
The point is, of course, that the peak moments of discovery are enormously important. They’re about the lost sheep that was found again: the realisation that
· the scope was wrongly understood,
· a key stakeholder had been missed,
· a critical scenario had not been documented.
Moments of discovery are the proof that analysing goals and stakeholders and scenarios is really worth it. They show unequivocally that requirements work saves an untold amount of time, money, and chaos, delivers better products, improves people’s lives. That’s what it’s all about.
No matter that the other 99% of the time nothing much happened. All the procedures, the training, the patient study, the careful documentation were to enable these moments. The perspiration is necessary, but nobody will remember it afterwards.
© Ian Alexander 2007