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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

The problem with the approach you just described is that it's missing analysis. You got a list of features, not use cases. Maybe the customer wanted to solve a particular problem, but the only way they got to elucidate it was in terms of incremental functionality. Better than the wrong thing, but not the way to delight your customer either, I bet.

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The problem with the approach you just described is that it's missing analysis.

It's not missing analysis, it's missing the analysis phase.

Instead of working against human nature by tediously building use cases, data flow diagrams, logic flows, process breakdowns, etc., etc., etc. before doing any development, analysis, design, development, testing, and deployment are tightly coupled in many small iterations. That's the whole point.

No, I'm not talking about an analysis phase in a waterfall development. I'm talking about the blindness you can get when you're incrementally developing at the level of features, when you can no longer see the bigger goals.

The key question is "Why" that needs to be asked. A customer may think they want to sort, select, and aggregate the data, but fundamentally "get the data" is very rarely the real reason for doing something.

That data is used to make a decision, and it's important that developers seek to understand exactly what that decision needs. Your users will often walk their way into a bad solution to their real problem because they will use their (incomplete) understanding of what is available.

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