Beyond Legacy Code

Chapter 5Practice 1: Say What, Why, and for Whom Before How

Up to 50% of development time in a traditional software project is taken up by gathering requirements. It’s a losing battle from the start. When teams are focused on gathering requirements, they’re taking their least seasoned people—business analysts who don’t have a technical orientation in terms of coding—and sending them in to talk to customers. Invariably they end up parroting what the customer says.

We all have a tendency to tell people what we think they want to hear, and some customer-facing professionals still fall into this trap. It’s uncomfortable to try to find a way to tell your customer, “No, you don’t want that, you want this,” or “Let’s not worry about how it works and ...