What can I ask to break down vague requirements?
Hello! 👋🏼
I finished my first JIRA ticket today and I was assigned another ticket, but this ticket feels different…its requirements are significantly more vague.
I understand at a high-level what the requirements for this task are:
- check a folder for new files every x min
- copy new files to another folder
- keep track of copied files
These are examples of some the questions I had, however they feel too low-level for the analysis stage.
- what file types can I expect?
- should the frequency be editable?
- how should the program handle a job run that takes > x minutes?
So, my question is this: what high-level questions can I ask to further demystify these vague requirements and future requirements?
Discussion
(1 comment)- 32 years agoRobinhood, Meta, Course Hero, PayPal
Here's my process for refining requirements:
- Read the task carefully.
- Envision the code in my brain.
- If there are gaps in what the code looks like in #2, ask questions to clarify.
That being said, you generally ask lower-level questions to refine requirements. Coding is a very precise craft - All halfway decent software engineers know how badly 1 bad line of code can mess up everything.
All of your questions make sense to me - If you can see how that affects your code, just ask them!
- file types can I expect? - Maybe you need to call different APIs to process tricky file types like video or very large files (>1 GB).
- should the frequency be editable? - If this is a cron job, it can be expensive. This could easily be a core requirement.
- how should the program handle a job run that takes > x minutes? - If there's some sort of UI involved, maybe you want to throw up a loading animation.
what high-level questions can I ask to further demystify these vague requirements and future requirements?
As mentioned before, I don't think high-level questions can really demystify the current requirements, but they can put you in a better position to figure out future requirements by deepening your understand of your team's process and people map. Here are some questions:
- Who's the best person to go to with these kinds of questions? (this will likely point you to some people)
- What kind of scale is our system dealing with? (are there tons of files or extremely large files?)
- How fast do I need to complete this task and similar tasks in the future?
