Why hackers should track their requirements
“Creating requirements” may not be the first two words that come to mind when you think of a hacker, but nothing could be more important. Whether those requirements exist entirely inside the developer’s head or span multiple directories depends on the person and the project they are working on, but all of us create requirements if we expect the product of our efforts to look anything like what we were intending to create. Oftentimes, the quality of our requirements directly corelate to the quality of our product.
It is for the hacker that I developed the tool rst. It is an ultra-simple method of writing requirements and specifications so they can be tracked throughout the lifecycle of a project.
Common developer wisdom (hacker and enterprise alike) now tells us that we should always be using revision control, that we should always be writing unit tests and that we should keep good documentation – and we should, and there are a ton of great tools for doing exactly those things. However, those “core pillars” of good software development miss one of the most important pieces, and that is writing down your requirements, creating your high level design (linked to your reqs), and thinking about what tests to write before you write your code.
All the tools that I have seen for this are Web/GUI’s that are clunky and difficult to integrate. They are particularily ill-suited to small projects. It doesn’t make sense to me. If we are to become good at requirements, we need to practice for small projects so that we know what we are doing for large ones. This problem isn’t difficult to solve: requirements are just text that have a few basic features:
- you want to be able to name them
- you want to be able to describe them
- you want to be able to link them
- you want to be able to track their completeness
- you want to be able to revision control them
These four goals are trivial to accomplish for a text based tool and quite difficult to accomplish for a GUI tool. Why then are so many requirements tracking tools GUI based?
rst chooses to be simple instead of complicated, while still choosing to provide features users want (i.e. viewing requirements via the web in future releases). Creating requirements and specifications is something all of us should be doing for our projects – wouldn’t it be great if it were easy to do?
I intend to add a “hacker’s guide to quality” tutorial to the rst wiki over the next couple of months. I would highly appreciate feedback from developers all over the world about how they address quality in their projects, and what rst could do to help them.