The Power Of “Why?”

How many times in your career as a software developer have you been handed a “requirement” that turned out to be difficult and costly to fulfil? I’ve been there many times, and I imagine you have, too. The hack I discovered a few years into my career is that one person’s “what” is almost always another person’s “how”. Software requirements very rarely describe an actual need – a user goal, for example. They’re usually a decision that someone has taken about how to address a need. When we make decisions – the user will select their house number from a drop-down list – we constrain future possible decisions, reducing the options we have available to solve a problem we might not even be aware exists. Visualising design decisions as a tree, we can more clearly see the relationships between decisions – how one decision is a consequence of an earlier decision. We can traverse the tree in three directions – we can go down by asking “How?” How are we going to populate the list of house…