Week 4: Requirements

Goal

The goal of this session is to help students practice capturing what the customer really wants and turning it into clear, specific, and actionable requirements instead of vague or meaningless ones.

Expected Results Before This Week

Weekly Progress Check rules

  • Be prepared to show your results at the beginning of class.
  • Presenting teams are selected randomly each week. The same team may be selected repeatedly.
  • If your team is selected and there is no relevant work recorded before the session, 3 points will be deducted. Any relevant demonstrable work avoids the deduction: the weekly score is then between 0 and +3 points, depending on quality and completeness.
  • A missing expected result can cause a point deduction only once, but you should still catch up: later work may depend on it, and these results usually contribute to the tasks required for your desired grade. More about salary for tasks

How Weekly Progress Checks work · More about penalty and bonus points

This week's expected results

  • Create your team's GitLab group and make sure all team members are included. Finalize the team introduction from last week and put it into the group description so the group clearly represents the team. See Team is formed and organized task.
  • Make a concrete project choice and create its GitLab project inside your team's group. Explain and justify the choice in the project's README.md, including why the team selected it over the other candidates. See Project is selected task.
  • Agree on responsibilities within the team and record the result in the GitLab project in a form that is visible and understandable to the whole team. Make sure every important responsibility has an owner and that the assignment reflects how you actually plan to work. See Responsibilities are assigned within team task.
  • Be ready to demonstrate any tutor-selected or classmate-requested part of Milestone #1. The demonstrated result must already be visible in your GitLab group or project before the session; explanations without recorded evidence do not count.
Title Duration
Spot The Subjective Transformation Effect 30 minutes
Deliverable: Team and Project Kick-Off 30 minutes
Advanced Topics -

Notes for tutors: 

1: Spot The Subjective Transformation Effect (30 minutes)

Activities

Interview Excerpt 1

“Honestly, everyone in the department struggles with this software. It just doesn’t make sense — it takes forever to do anything, and people get confused all the time. I mean, we’ve all used other tools before, so it’s not like we need training. The problem is the interface; it’s outdated. You know, if it looked more like modern apps, people would definitely use it more. Reports? Nobody has time for those anyway — they’re too complicated.”

Interview Excerpt 2

“When a customer has an issue, the system should just deal with it automatically. Our competitors already do that, and their clients are much happier. It should recognize what kind of problem it is and fix it right away — that’s how customer satisfaction works now. Manual handling always leads to errors and frustration. The software should be smart enough to prevent complaints before they happen.”

Interview Excerpt 3

“Most users don’t really care about security — they just want to log in fast. Everyone forgets passwords anyway, and honestly, those who complain about the login are just the ones using old devices. The best fix would be to make it passwordless. That way, we’ll finally stop getting support tickets about login problems, and users will feel safer because it’s modern technology.”

2: Deliverable: Team and Project Kick-Off (30 minutes)

  • Each team introduces themselves (name, role, background). See related task for more details.
  • Each team presents their chosen project idea to the class. See related task for more details.
  • Other teams could check the teams' work looking for subjective transformations effects (discussed in previous activity).

Presentation Technical Requirements

  • Each team has no more than 5 minutes to present the whole deliverable to the class.
  • Use the created GitLab group and project to share information: List of Members, README.md, team_rules.md, etc.
  • Slides are not required for this session.

3: Advanced Topics (-)

Why is this useful for me?

Things you learn and experience in this session will help you to solve the following tasks:

From Subjective Notes to Objective Needs

Background

Activities