Elicitation

Started off on James Governor's blog this morning, with an interesting post about a series of events taking place in UK lead by James Stamper and got lead through his blog to a very interesting paper on Requirements Elicitation. Having recently implemented change policy, governance and SDLC at Corel, I was very interested to see this blast from the past - a pertinent reminder that we still face the same issues 14 years later and the human condition still prevails in IT.

Carnegie-Mellon's Michael G Christel and Kyo C Yang provide a brilliant and still relevant position as seen in the overview of the problem in the abstract of the paper:

"There are many problems associated with requirements engineering, including problems in defining the system scope, problems in fostering understanding among the different communities affected by the development of a given system, and problems in dealing with the volatile nature of requirements. These problems may lead to poor requirements and the cancellation of system development, or else the development of a system that is later judged unsatisfactory or unacceptable, has high maintenance costs, or undergoes frequent changes. By improving requirements elicitation, the requirements engineering process can be improved, resulting in enhanced system requirements and potentially a much better system.

Requirements engineering can be decomposed into the activities of requirements elicitation, specification, and validation. Most of the requirements techniques and tools today focus on specification, i.e., the representation of the requirements. This report concentrates instead on elicitation concerns, those problems with requirements engineering that are not adequately addressed by specification techniques. An elicitation methodology is proposed to handle these concerns.

This new elicitation methodology strives to incorporate the advantages of existing elicitation techniques while comprehensively addressing the activities performed during requirements elicitation. These activities include fact-finding, requirements gathering, evaluation and rationalization, prioritization, and integration. Taken by themselves, existing elicitation techniques are lacking in one or more of these areas."

Like it or not, agree or not with the methodology, you are engaged in requirements elicitation if you are in IT. I have to run to an ops meeting, but I am not stopping my rant on this yet. It strikes me that we have come a long way with Agility, but the bottom line is that if you don't start your journey facing in the right direction, then it will always take you longer to get there.

Now, where am I going?

Pass the Beatz, Pastor Beatz

Posting on mix2r is a great way (brilliant idea, Duane and Matt) for musicians to share ideas, collaborate and get feedback on tracks, hacks, jacks and smacks. It feels funny to do it though - its not like you are just putting music out there to share. Instead you are asking for an audition with other musicians that are also interested in auditioning for you...something like that. I'll get used to it.

My favourite music: Music I have never heard before
Where to find it: Click a random link on mix2r

RAW data

Robert Anton Wilson has a blog. Not a big blog, but RAW Data is significant as a moment in time.

It's either a first for high-brow thinking or a first for low-brow posing/faking.

I know that we are all hoping it's real...now we need one of those Google verification tags that works on thought leaders.

Noone cares what you think...

I hear this a lot in conversations around blogging, forums and general social computing studies. "Noone cares what I think, why would I do that...?"

I want to set the record straight on this. Noone cares what you want them to think. Everyone cares what you really think. Subtle? Obscure? Marketing diss?

Just be yourself. Really.