Datasheet

Telling Stories
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can go page by page, or skip to the part you care about. Wherever you go, you’ll
be able to clearly observe how the story has continued. You’ll know where you
are, what subject is being addressed, and how it fits into the whole. You’ll also
know where to go to find anything else.
The tools comprising Structured Analysis do not produce what people think
of as a story, but there is a story underlying nearly every part—it just doesn’t
look like an old‑fashioned one. Add a bit of summary material before your
diagrams and put them in order, and you have a graphic story, more like a
comic book than a traditional book, but a story nonetheless.
Who Should Do This Work?
Most of the people I’ve heard strongly criticize writing software requirements
are really good at developing software or managing projects and really bad at
writing. With better training and support, some people who feel this way can
produce adequate requirements, but there is no escaping their fundamental
distaste for the work. After much strenuous effort to work around and with
those who hate writing requirements, I’ve come to agree with them. Great
software developers and project managers have many wonderful talents, but
writing usually isn’t one of them.
Why not get people who are really good writers to do it? When you know
Beethoven and Shakespeare, you don’t force Beethoven to write you a sonnet;
you call Shakespeare. Why have we been forcing software developers to do a
writer’s job? Where are all the requirements writers?
There aren’t many working in IT departments, consulting firms, and soft‑
ware companies. These organizations have become so focused on what they
consider “technical” skills that you will have a hard time finding anyone who
can write in many of them. I became frustrated with the recruiting process at
a firm where I used to work when I found that its college recruiting targeted
only computer science majors. I asked one of the recruiters what percentage
of the IT jobs at the firm were best filled by computer science majors. The
answer was maybe 40 percent, definitely less than half. What about all the
other jobs? No answer. I have nothing against computer science majors, but
when I interviewed them, only a few had any English or even liberal arts
classes on their transcripts.
Why isn’t writing English considered an important technical skill? Who
is going to write the documentation, the proposals, the presentations, the
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