I’ve decided that gathering requirements is lot like this video:
Did you catch what you were supposed to?
Projects are often full of invisible gorillas. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a few gorilla tracks during the process to let you know that they are there. Other times, you won’t see the gorillas until they charge out of the bushes and start terrorizing innocent bystanders.
The problem is that often the business doesn’t know they have a gorilla infestation. Oh, sure they can tell you all about the poo flinging monkeys up in the trees, but the gorillas are all invisible until someone slips on a banana peel and ends up breaking a hip.
It’s hard to spot gorillas in the wild. They seem to either wear stealth fur, or are just very good at hiding behind things. And like the gorilla in the video, if you’re busy trying to figure out what kind of trees are in the jungle, they become very hard to spot.
You can stand back a bit, and try to get a better overview of the problem, but then you have to be careful not to fall off a cliff because you were too busy watching for gorillas to pay attention to your surroundings.
The thing you don’t want to do is waste time looking for snakes in the underbrush too. They might be hiding there, but unless they are going to bite you, they’re probably safe to ignore.
I better let you get back to work. We just moved a system to production and we have a bad case of baboons, and they’re EVERYWHERE!