On systems coaching

A skill central to requirements engineering is knowing which questions will uncover the real requirements. The author explains how we can apply techniques from family therapy to ask better, more relevant questions, which find its way into the professional business community as an activity known as coaching. The coaching model provides a good framework that can be used for discovering requirements. Requirements specification lies in the dialogue between the users and owners of the systems that the engineers produce. The challenge of using questions open up many views so we never make a final decision or actually freeze the specification. This is where the GROW (goal, reality, options, wrap-up) model from coaching guide us toward a possible solution.