Efficiently gathering requirements is not an easy task. Even experienced professionals can struggle if they don’t follow a method. Compiling too much or casting the net too wide will flood meaningful information among useless one. If you are lucky, you may lose time. If you are not, you may totally miss your initial target. As often, experience and contextual knowledge are crucial. See how shopping analogy can support in that matter.

Raw

Messy product list. Basically, where you start from, without prior knowledge of the domain.

Do not delay, write down early. Most of the time, ideas fly away and disappear.

Your brain being both not that trustable - I speak about normal human being - and obviously not sharable - I speak about every single human being, especially those you think they do not fall in the first category - with your team, essential information has to be written down.

Shopping with and without a list usually don’t have the same outcome. Even if you may forget to buy something with a list, the probability drastically increases without any.

Improved

Assuming you gain additional insights, such as access to the store’s shelving layout, especially how products are tied up and grouped by.

You can then amend your first list and group products accordingly, by creating - virtual - clusters.

Optimized

Assuming you obtain further insights, for instance the shop topology.

You are now able to follow the best path to optimize your run, smartly sorting cluster list you previously end up with. Notice how we manage to organize every cluster internals as well.

The journey

Closing

Best analogies are the ones which manage to remain simple while strongly supporting intent. Shopping falls within this category. It stresses how better contextual knowledge can seamlessly translate into smarter outcome. Here, we end up with the same content, but both smartly clustered and sorted. Keep this in mind next time you need to gather requirements.