Requirements Gathering - Part 1

Okay, so enough bull shitting. Time to stop procrastination. Less talk more walk. Knuckle down.

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The first step in the waterfall model of development is requirements gathering. Of course, the waterfall development model is like this big, bureaucratic model of government, whereas Agile is like the libertarian model of government where everything takes care of itself if you just let it. You have to let the pig run wild and free so that it may fly.

Okay, that maybe a long shot.

Maybe the first step of any development model is to choose how you're actually going to develop something. It's almost like a meta-step. Deciding your development model before you understand you and your team's capabilities and the kind of project is like a President telling an army to fight two completely different wars before figuring out that they're separate enemies who'd probably have antagonized each other more if they didn't have a common enemy to deal with.

So, let's try to tease out our development model by some kind of socratic method -

Q: What is the project?
A: To save the world

Q: What is the world made of?
A: People, animals, plants, natural resources, ecologies, societies and other memetic lifeforms

Q: What is the current system?
A: [This one's a long one]

• Humans are at the top of most chains - food, resource, space
  
• Humans depend more on the environment than the environment depends on us
• Living things need to eat, breathe, drink, move, hide, rest, reproduce
• Humans mainly live in groups - some small, some large, and interconnected by long distance communication
• We have a mixture of systems that have different ranges of freedoms
  

Q: What are the current limitations of the system?
A:

• We are running out of resources
• There is inertia against change and change is exponential
  
• There's, at the same time, both too much and too little information about the system
  
• There are conflicting goals - want more and to save, want transparency and privacy, want freedom and security, want efficiency but consensus, we want comfort and children
  

The next part is to make sense of all this and see a path through this. That way, we'll develop the methodology requirements an effort to save to world must meet.