Design Driven Requirements Gathering

I had the opportunity today to test a new product that we have been developing in an initial requirements meeting with a client. Working with a limited budget, we were trying to run an Agile project but the attendees were getting confused with some of the technical jargon like Epic (our fault).

After half an hour of good discussion but no real progress, I suggested we try a different approach when someone asked what the final product might look like. “Let’s build it now and see” I prompted.

A little nervously I opened up Skyve Foundry (still in an early beta stage) and created a new application for the project. We were building a knowledge bank and no one really knew where to start. I prompted by asking what sort of documents would need to be stored. “Meeting minutes” came out from the back so I started with that. “What field would be on a form when adding meeting minutes?” I added the fields, clicked the deploy button and 2 minutes later we had an enterprise web application available on the Internet.

Everyone quickly got it and started suggesting additional information to be captured in the knowledge bank. Half an hour later we had seven screens full of fields and I was able to leave the attendees with the link – so they could play and test on their own devices – until the next meeting.

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