Regardless of the development process used, the project doesn't exist without some form of requirements. The first step in even agile processing is to determine what the requirements of at least the current timebox are.

While researching guided interviews and use case scenarios, it became clear that they were just two steps in the over all process of requirements gathering, so I lumped them together on this page. I'll be documenting the best practices I've found in my readings of several texts, and in at least two cases pointing to further readings recommended by those authors which I have yet to get my hands on.

Commercializing Great Products with Design for Six Sigma

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While this text is primarily concerned with the generation of software for commercial sale/use, the sections on preparing and conducting Guided Interviews are very appropriate.

Crafting the Interview Guide

Purpose Statement

The interview guide should include a single sentence purpose statement. The book gives several sample templates for the structure of these sentences but they generally breakdown into:

To Verb for gaining information Customer Focus in order to Business Focus

An overly simplified example of this from my own recent projects would be:

To discover the methods and standard practices that the MRC uses to provide AV and technical support to events in order to help design a system which will automate and track equipment/inventory as well as provide additional billing capabilities.

Interview Objectives

Beyond a high level purpose statement to the entire interview visit. There should be several more tangible, measurable objectives listed for the interview. These items should support the purpose statement. Basically we are crafting the list of information we have to acquire to have a successful interview. There should be between 5 and 10 interview objectives.

Continuing the MRC Example for bullet point objectives:

• Gather information about the various types of events supported by the MRC
• Establish a guideline for project timetables
• Learn about the various equipment types/configurations for events.
• Determine the functional capabilities of current billing systems
• Determine the MRC customer's expectations of service.

Crafting the Interview Questions

The text recommends that the interview team all now begin brainstorming sets of questions for the project in mind using the general guidelines of Category, Current Situation or Today, and Where We Want To Be or Tomorrow. The table below is an example of that from the text.