Abstraction vs. Precision in Requirements
I used to be an instructor for Rational Software’s RequisitePro software, which included a class called “Requirements College.” This useful class helped teach people how to elicit requirements from their customers.
Three things that really stuck with me from the class were, first, the idea that one does not “gather requirements’ per se, but elicits them. If taken literally, “gathering requirements” implies that requirements are readily available and you just have to pick them up and take them. This flies in the face of reality; requirements have to be created from nothing.
The second was the idea that How and What are relative to a point of view. I’ve written about this in the past.
The third was that, according to the course, abstraction and precision form a spectrum that affects comprehensibility. The idea was that if you are too abstract, your writing won’t be comprehensible at all. But if you are too precise, it’s also not comprehensible. The following graph illustrates the idea:
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