This overlooked resource is a talk that Fred Brooks gave to a very small audience June 4, 2007 — the first day of the WSOM Design Requirements Workshop. He does not discuss requirements or elicitation of requirements (which is what everybody else talked about) but rather discusses design as a process and how that is inseparable from the process of divining requirements. His primary points are:
- You can’t know what you want to build until you already have something concrete. Everything is a throw-away until it is “good enough”.
- Since you can’t know what you want to build, you don’t know the requirements, even after you start work. This indicates that the process of design and the process of divining requirements cannot be treated separately the way that academic literature treats the subjects.
- The design process sometimes occurs in a more complex environment than in past years because of the late 20th century concept of “collaborative design”. Further, this is not the best design model for every project.
Unlike many other Fred Brooks talks there is a bit of audience interruption — sometimes with valid points, sometimes not — and you can observe both Fred’s unscripted response as well as others in the audience responding to audience comments and questions. It is interesting from a human perspective for this reason as well.