hughk's Journal: What do you require?

When you design a large system you take information about what the business wants and you convert them into something that a programmer, who may know little about the business can implement. As the audience for the specification document is technical, full of wonderful things like UML, we can't expect the business to understand it. This is why it is very useful to capture requirements in a form that the business can understand and sign-off.

Of course, the real issue is that when the business receives the software, they are reasonably certain that the system is attempting to implement what they wanted.

Pretty obvious? How come I'm on a massive project for a major German project with no formal requirements. It appears that the scope of the system was decided by SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) and the business analysts at meetings which were not formally minuted. How do we know if it will ever work?