Requirements Monster
It feels like a city… of brick and mortar, steel and glass. But the walls are grey blocks: nondescript surfaces without texture or light.
Your avatar character makes its way down streets and alleys, picking up torched tendrils. The pieces sear into your protective gloves, as you sprint toward Central Square.
There it lies. The Monster you are building. Attaching the piece to the whole, the burnt mass flashes once, then shapeshifts to a pulsing green mass. Oh, the satisfaction you feel with each connection made! Your heart thumps like a gambler pulling the slot machine lever, as the 8-bit soundtrack throbs faster.
Before picking up another tentacle and attaching it to the Requirements Monster, you must go back to the Junction Box. Junction is where you find your protective gear hanging on pegs: hard hats, gloves, lab coats. There are 7 roles you must use to finish your Monster. The maroon hat is the Information Architect. The lavender: User Experience Director. The blue is Project Manager, and yellow is Product Owner. The purple is Software Engineer.
The Monster’s body grows and multiplies with every attached piece, until tentacles reach down all adjacent city blocks and scroll up the surrounding buildings. The smell it emanates is of a dusty, warm fan running at high speed in vintage laptop. The place gets warmer and warmer and your avatar starts perspiring. Run, run back to the Junction Box and flip the AC switch!
Wiping your brow with a sound effect “whew”, you spin on a heel to behold what you have done.
Towering above you is a bubbling mass of energy, excited to launch into the sky and take over the land. It flashes from green to blue and even red, undulating like rough waters at sunset. Even the nondescript surrounding buildings are enlivened from Pong-like blocks into detectable (yet much more delectable) titled textures.
But something is missing.
Through the city maze, in a hidden alleyway, a sizzling chunk remains. It might as well be end of Time Bandits, when the final piece is found in a toaster. When once it is touched, everything blows up in your face.
Your character spins again on its heel, staring at the Junction Box. Oh no. Oh hell no! The Business Analyst hat still remains on its peg!
And then, like that thing at the end of Xaxxon that you can’t ever get past, you’re vaporized in a poof. Game over and start again.
It leaves you wondering: What the heck just happened? And so it is… a video game that doesn’t exist, yet reflects actual digital application development. ‘Round every corner, there’s another piece you didn’t think about. Another requirement for the form and function of your emerging digital beast.
The only sure thing?: You won’t forget that edge case again.
As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.
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