> There's an old joke about posting requirements to a job site: "(1) awesome webapp (2) really useful (3) must make me a billion dollars.
> The requirements problem is like that.
Yeah. Someone, in the history of SW had a great idea: requirements must be atomic.
That's why a lot of products break when they are put together.
> Requirements are "gathered." Reality doesn't work like that. They aren't gathered. They're invented. a collection of requirements adds up to a design. Thinking of it as a bunch of requirements leads to designed by committee problems.
They are gathered. They are however, not a collection. They depend on each other. And when this depenfence is missing or left over the engineer will invent it to compensate for the lack of it. Every engineer. In its own way.
> Designers need to know the problem space, the materials, etc. The requirements part can't be separated from those, which is exactly what the concept promotes.
True. But "requirements must be atomic" :(