Requirements

The hard reality of speccing a system and tying to get it built hit this week. I’ve talked previously about the idea of functioning prototypes as a method for communicating clearly and testing ideas rapidly - faced with the reality of constraints has involved rethinking some of our design ideas. Whilst this can be a bit disheartening I have to remind myself that it’s part of the process, and I have no reason in the many years I’ve been doing this to think that it’ll be anything different. Finding out that you need to rethink and redesign can be a chore if you’ve mentally moved to other things.

I went to a meeting about the cuts at work, and had lots of the inevitable hushed conversations about who is affected and what the possible futures might be. It’s a pretty distracting and concerning time when it seems that so many things that should be settled and stable are up for debate. Trying your best to look for a way through can be hard. Probably the worst thing to do is overthink things and worry. With that in mind I ended up in my new, admittedly strange, happy place - messing about in spreadsheets and ‘interrogating’ some pretty basic ‘data’.