Developing detailed business support systems with software can be hard. The quickly changing requirements mess up earlier assumptions – and even if new facts are good since you learn more – you eventually end up in a chokehold where you need to choose between correcting implemented knowledge from yesterday or add new knowledge from today.
You – as the “software developer”/”solution architect”/”only grown up in the room” is probably the only one “capable of”/”interested in” tracking the current Gist of the system or best known idea of what the system is supposed to do. Everyone else is probably happy to just shoot new or revised requirements at you from the hip like were they information age cowboys – with machine guns.
There are two major strategies to manage this situation before you go mad.
- Slow the process down so that you can keep up
- Become an augmented developer and tenfold your output and passed requirement memory
If you ask the persons that you build the software for, they will probably vote for you following strategy number 2. Simply because slow is not fun and it is expensive.
Drew Thomas – @truedrewco wrote this tweet suggesting that the area of “nocode” could be called “Augmented Development” instead – and it is brilliant I think! Spot on!