I’m about to start my main afternoon activity, which for weeks / months / or years depending on how one looks at the work has been filled with writing requirements.
For the record, we’ve been doing this thing for years, but the drafting of written requirements have been hit or miss. My first requirement was about two pages and included a crudely designed layout in Balsamiq that had a few boxes and copy in it. In my mind, it was all we needed.
But, B needed a little more. Okay, he needed a bunch more.
Over time, we got the basic requirement ideas in place and B started developing and designing at the same time. As you can guess, this sort of worked for the basic ideas but became a hot mess when we started looking at details.
It doesn’t help that our app marries two large but related ideas so instead of fleshing out just one big ass app, we’re fleshing out two big ass apps. So, back in 2016 we got ourselves a Confluence / JIRA account and our requirements at least started to look a little more thorough. I then studied up on agile requirements and planning (still a work in progress) to attempt to get our drafts accurate.
This year, we’re doing pretty well. The written requirements are looking pretty good and our wireframes are decent too. Not too bad after nearly two-years of making a mess out of the idea.
A big thing I’ve learned is to fight the urge to combine activities. I’m now trying to draft written business requirements and then do the wireframes rather than combining them. And, instead of trying to plan how the work is done at the same time, I’m now getting more feedback and doing joint planning with B and our new developer.
The separate has helped me move more quickly since it’s relatively easy to write down what we want to see from a screen and then draw pictures. The combined approach was really, really slowing down the process.