P&P Summit Day Three: Lunch Session - Requirements Gathering and Management

The lunch session today was given by John Socha-Leialoha who is a consultant working with P&P. He’s working on a research style project around gathering requirements. This isn’t a product that is planned to be produced, just some research to see if it is something that would be good to do.

First off he talked about dealing with the CAB (Composite UI Application Block). He set up a site called cabpedia.com, which is a community site around the CAB. This came from his work with the CAB when he helped to port the CAB to the compact framework.

The vision for this projects is to be very lightweight and not impose a specific process. Needs to work disconnected as well as connected. Needs to supports linking between items/levels, etc. It also needs to store different viewpoints for different stake holders.

He then pulled up a demo of a skeleton of what the product that would gather requirements would look like. It’ was only 1 month of work so far, so there really wasn’t much there, but enough to get an idea of what this would give you.

The whole thing is about gathering requirements, so it sounds like a type of Version One system to gather requirements.

One comment made from the crowd was that it sounded like they were recreating the TFS work items. The answers was that this was meant to compliment TFS, not subvert it in some manner.

Interesting Idea, but I’d like to see it when they get further. Right now I think it can be tracked with scenario work items in TFS if necessary.