Your grandma recipe is the best software requirements training
The ultimate stakeholder
I’m still lucky that I can call my grandma to ask her about the recipe for the different dishes she made us when we were children.
And I couldn’t help myself after feeling so frustrated by how she explained the recipe to me. It frustrated me in a familiar way…
Is my grandma the ultimate stakeholder!?
Aleix: Hi grandma! Could you tell me how to prepare X dish?
Grandma: Sure! Take a notes!
Aleix: Ready when you’re!
Grandma: Boil the water 💧
Aleix: Sure! ✅
Grandma: Add the potatos 🥔
Aleix: How many?
Grandma: A few
Aleix: Like 2?
Grandma: Yes, but depends on how many people. Pick some that are not too big not too small.
Aleix: Okey…
Grandma: Put them to the water and wait until they are done. 🍲
Aleix: How many minutes? ⌛
Grandma: When they are ready, you will know.
Aleix: OK, let’s continue.
Grandma: Add the carrots. 🥕
Aleix: Sure! What’s next?
Grandma: Put a side the beef, you want to fry it lightly. 🥩
Aleix: The beef!? When I have to do the beef?
Grandma: Of course you need to the beef before that! Didn’t I teach you anything? This kid…
And you can imagine the amount of going and fourth that we had. Result?
She wants to communicate all the business requirements ingredients and processes. I want to make the dish as she did. And yet, we cannot make it right, regardless how much effort we put into it.
The amount of experience she has is something that cannot be transmitted with a recipe, I have to practice.
And here we had two options.
Pair cooking
Pair with a senior cooking grandma to gain experience while receiving timely feedback that supports my growth in form of yelling, but also enjoying a good time with my grandma.
Not this way! You have to cut the potatoes thinner! That’s how your grandpa liked it.
Agile cooking
I don’t have the support of the Subject-matter expert (grandma), but I can leverage the feedback from early adopters of the MVD (Minimal Viable Dish), my partner and friends, until they churn because of being at risk to be food poisoned.
Focusing on gathering feedback from them, improve the booking process and product, until I master the recipe.
Conclusions
Enjoy the time with your grandma, she will teach you valuable lessons.
One being preparing you to deal with the messiness of the world.
Regardless of how much we try to make sense of the world and have more accurate requirements, there’s no way to transmit all the knowledge and experience without the practice.
Best case scenario, collaborate with the stakeholders and SME to have the shortest feedback loop possible. In case that’s not possible, reach for feedback from early adopters, and mature the product and method!
I hope this post helped you to call your grandma to get that recipe that you enjoyed that much when you were a kid.