Ask HN: Better tools for the software requirements / scoping phase?
As someone that spends most of their days at the design&#x2F;scoping phase, then watching the product go into development where it encounters constant misunderstandings and gotchas that the customer never told us about or never realised themselves, I completely agree that there is a huge disconnect between the scoping and requirements phase and the build phase.<p>I almost have guilt over feeling like my work of design and scoping is effectively useless to a developer, all my mockup layouts have to be built ground-up, my requirements aren&#x27;t actionable in any way unless they feel like reading them (I try to keep them as succinct as possible, but the nature of working for clients also means I have to be somewhat specific so that people know when they should actually pay us). I&#x27;ve looked into things like Cucumber (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cucumber.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cucumber.io&#x2F;</a>) so that my requirements can actually be compiled as tests, but adoption is slow and arduous, and all I&#x27;m really doing is adding more work to a dev.<p>My latest line of thinking is that I need a way to show the user interface, and then the data flow and logic all the way back through the system (usually a back-end DB or a customer legacy system). It&#x27;s vital that these are presented together, hence my current process is interactive mock-ups built in Sketch (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sketchapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sketchapp.com&#x2F;</a>) and hosted on Invision (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.invisionapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.invisionapp.com&#x2F;</a>) which allows the customer and developer to click around and see it on a mobile screen so they really get a feel for it. Finally I couple that with a BPMN diagram which has swim lanes not just for the traditional system swim lanes, but also for a user (i.e. User taps Submit) and for a user interface (i.e. shows the mockup screen that is displayed), and then the logic flows down through the diagram. (e.g. User, User Interface, Mobile App Logic, Server Logic, Server DB, etc.)