Dilbert gathers requirements

Another great Dilbert – http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2006-02-26/

I won’t show the cartoon here, but here’s a quote from the first two panels:

Pointy-haired boss: Why is your project four months behind?
Dilbert: I still don’t have the user’s requirements because she’s a complete nut-job.
[…]

This cartoon does point out the critical importance of eliciting the requirements, not requesting the requirements. We can’t expect our stakeholders to just put together a requirements doc and hand it to us. Even if they happened to be trained in requirements management, gathering requirements will not be their top priority.

Instead of asking his user for requirements, Dilbert should have interviewed her.

Great Dilbert products

The latest book (Nov 2005) from Scott Adams, Thriving on Vague Objectives

From D. Reller:

Another Dilbert collection, another great Dilbert collection. Highly recommended, of course, if you work in an IT/IS/MIS department, or just in an office. They never get old, or out-of-date. Mr. Adams hasn’t slowed down or backed off one bit – Ratbert the $100 million CEO-reject, multiple Wally updates, Dilbert and dating….

Reading too much to buy another book? Check out the DVDs
Dilbert – The Complete Series (1999)

From Adam Dukovich:

The voice acting is excellent. The characters all sound just as they would be expected to when reading the comic strip. Daniel Stern as Dilbert, Larry Miller as the clueless boss (who had to have been based off of one of Scott Adams’ bosses), Larry Charles as slacker engineer Wally, Kathy Griffin as Alice, the triangular-haired female engineer, and Chris Elliot as Dilbert’s sidekick Dogbert, not to mention a parade of guest stars, including Tom Green, Andy Dick, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jason Alexander. Put simply, this show had talent to burn.