Why software development is hard

The article doesn't mention the most important thing to do in requirements gathering: putting all the stakeholders in a room at the same time with a professional facilitator extracting REAL needs until everyone agrees, locking the door so no one gets out, and feeding them (so they don't notice that the door is locked).

What most analysts fail to realize is that there usually is NO ONE person with all the answers. And most people have DIFFERENT answers. So they don't see the need for this. And do see the need for everything else that doesn't work: UML, DFDs, Rational Rose, Microsoft project, etc., etc., etc.

Comprehensive requirements gathering makes all the other headaches go away. Anything less is an endless loop.

The requirements specification can pass from the customer/user (CU), to the customer's manager (CM), to a customer advocate (CA), to a business analyst (BA), to a project manager (PM), to a development team (DM) to the Developers. Well, a man with many masters is slave to none. Likewise for code.

"Programming is not complicated because computers are complicated—it’s complicated because your requirements are complicated (even if you don’t know it yet)."

--Chris Ashton