Requirements

Before you start coding—yes, before you start coding—you need to know what it is you’re going to build. That’s what requirements are: a list of stuff you have to implement in order to create your terrific program. Most developers hate requirements. Really. All we’d like to do is sit down and start coding. All of us have that super-programmer mentality; just give us the problem and we can sit down and design and code it on the fly. Not! If you want to be a productive developer and make fewer errors and come up with a good, clean design, you need requirements. The more detailed they are, the better. A good set of requirements tells you just what the program is supposed to do. It gives you the scaffolding around which you’ll hang your design. You’ll do requirements anyway—it’s one of those steps in a standard development lifecycle that you can’t avoid—but if you don’t make room for it in your project, you won’t create a great program. Being intentional about requirements forces you to think about the details of the program, and it also lets you listen to the users so you have a better idea of what they really want. So let’s talk about requirements.