My history with software development starts before I graduated high school. I was taking programming courses at the local community college. I was getting small jobs to help software developers and working a cooperative job for a computer consultant in Essexville, MI. The simple fact is that I started my career as a developer learning where the semicolons and braces go.

Over the years, I’ve written dozens of articles on software development. Some of the ones I felt like were most important got bundled up into a book that I called Constructing Quality Software. Before and after that time I was studying and researching software development including what at one time was the new concept of agile software development. In short I was trying to understand the software development market as best as I could.

Over the last 10 years I’ve done quite a bit of work making development for Microsoft SharePoint easier but I’ve also “wandered off” the development reservation by spending time doing IT infrastructure, information architecture, knowledge management, organizational change, etc. I decided that I wanted to get a broader perspective.

When I was looking to come back one to what I’ve learned in my journeys, I realized that one of the key skills that was common to my development and non-development projects is that every successful project starts with a shared understanding of the problem being solved – and that means developing a set of requirements.

So I have spent some of my time over the last several months working on the development of a course that can teach some of the key skills of software requirements gathering to my fellow developers. The idea was simple. Whether someone is a developer tasked with gathering their own requirements – or is someone who has requirements created for them that they need to validate – I wanted to quickly develop those skills.

I found through the development that one key challenge that developers – and non-developers – have is the ability to assess whether requirements are good or not. In the course I put together I knew that I’d need to help people with specific techniques to validate whether an individual requirement is good. I also knew I’d need to help folks know when the overall set of requirements were good.

The result of my journey and my struggles to create content is three hours and eleven minutes of video that I’ve published through Pluralsight. You can find the course on their site at http://beta.pluralsight.com/courses/gathering-good-requirements-developers

If you’re not familiar with Pluralsight – they’re the premiere learning platform for developers – and non-developers. Their model is a subscription model where you pay one fee and can watch whatever content you need. I highly recommend that you try it out if you haven’t. You can even watch my course on gathering good requirements – if you’re interested. I’d love the feedback here or directly though my email.