Surprise Requirements

I was working on designing solutions to some new client needs recently. Our process is to map all requirements to sections of our design. It is a little tricky when more than one team works on a set of requirements. I mapped those requirements I thought my team fulfilled. Then I passed the mapping document over to the other team involved.

Sometimes I am able to detect some requirements that are not necessarily new. They are just newly documented. It is a problem that they are just lumped together with the new requirements. But that is a story for another post. There were there requirements at the end of my mapping which seemed strange to me. They did not seem to be related to the new functionality. They also did not seem to be things the system already did.

I decided to get in touch with our requirements lead. Apparently these were requirements previously collected but never implemented. They need to be completed along with all the changes I am working on. That is a bit tricky. They should not be mapped to the new design I produced. They need to go with a future design that was yet to be written. Tricky.

Timesheet Recording

The suits on the project want to record how much time we actually spend working on new features. They think we are spending too much time on them. Guess what? They are half right. We are spending a lot of calendar time ... doing things other than working on new features.

The little time we actually spend on the new features causes the schedule to drag on. Our team decided to record the time we spend on tasks during the day. Iteration one is using Excel spreadsheets to track everything. Hey. I am game for anything that tracks actuals.

Initially the team wanted me to record start and stop times for tasks. Dude. I work on all kinds of tasks and get interrupted from each all the time. There is no time (no pun intended) to record all those starts and stops. The goal here is to collect duration of tasks. Therefore I am only record the daily duration on every task I do.

The team lead thought we should record down to the 15 minute increment. Nope. Thirty minutes is the least I can do. Otherwise I am going to be wasting more time recording the stuff. Pretty soon I hope we can use a tool to collect this data. But spreadsheets are good enough for right now. I find that I am even more diligent in recording everything I do, including all the interruptions.