The Quest for Good Requirements | 3
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Stakeholders
The stakeholders are the main source of requirements. They have specific needs that the analyst
must identify. This is easier said than done: often, stakeholders are not quite sure what they need
and they often don't know how to express what they need. It is the analyst's job to help uncover the
requirements of the stakeholders.
A stakeholder is anyone who has an interest in the successful outcome of the project, including
project sponsors, users, business executives, managers, developers, clients, customers, vendors, and
government or regulatory agencies.
Eliciting requirements is surprisingly hard work. Stakeholders often do not know exactly what they
need and eliciting the requirements can be quite challenging. As Fred Brooks has stated so poignantly
in his seminal essay "No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering"¹:
"The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build. No other part
of the conceptual work is as difficult as establishing the detailed technical requirement, including all the
interfaces to people, machines, and to other software systems. No other part of the work so cripples the
resulting system if done wrong. No other part is more difficult to rectify later."
He goes on to say that in a systems development project there are two kinds of complexities that must
be managed: accidental and essential (or inherent).
Much of software engineering is focused on reducing accidental complexity, which is the complexity
that we add to a project by way of the tools and programming languages that we use. For example,
writing code in C is much harder than Java, and writing code in Java is much harder than doing a
"mashup"² with web components.
While it is good to focus on reducing accidental complexity, much of the complexity of a project is
rooted in essential (or inherent) complexity. Essential complexity is the difficulty of the problem itself:
launching a rocket into orbit is hard no matter what programming language you use. The techniques
studied in this book are about managing essential complexity.
