Ted says: Clients don’t always say what they mean. This is 100% true. My experience is that the majority of all people in business can’t fully and clearly articulate their thoughts, either verbally or in writing. Compounding this are situations where the client isn’t 100% honest and forthcoming; these run the range from simple cautiousness to outright deceit. Thus, you typically can’t take a client’s statement at face value.

Furthermore, even if a client can say what they mean, they may not mean what they actually want. And, even if they mean what they want, they may not actually want what they need. It’s the need that should be fulfilled, but there’s a lot of obstacles in the way.

To make matters worse, these obstacles are often multiplied by the numerous layers of “clients” involved. Here’s an example based off a real-world situation (the one I was in until recently):

1. The implementor gets requirements from his immediate boss.
2. The boss gets the requirements from the business/marketing/client relations department.
3. The client relations department gets their requirements from a 3rd-party development company (who is subcontracting part of the work to the implementor’s company)
4. The contracting development company gets their requirements from the actual client.
5. The client gets their requirements from the users.

It’s easy to see how confusion and misinformation can affect the requirements when there’s this many stages between the producer and the consumer of a piece of software. That’s why it’s important to do a thorough review of a particular request to verify that the sights haven’t drifted too far off the target.

I like mining as metaphor. There’s a nugget of gold buried in a mountain of communication. You need to dig away all of the useless rock in order to find it. As you dig, you’d better be setting up struts of solid reasoning to keep it from collapsing on you… and you’d better be digging in the right direction, or else you might miss the prize entirely.