Being a student for too long, I’m not a big fan of assignments or projects anymore. Among all assignments I had to do at Georgia Tech, there is one that I truly appreciate and will never forget:

First year. First semester. Alex Orso’s class on Software Development Processes. First assignment is about requirements gathering. There’s no written information given about the assignment. To learn what the assignment is about, each group has to interview the professor for 15 minutes. In a way, the professor is the customer, who needs an application developed, and it’s our job to figure out the requirements by interviewing him.

None of the groups were able to gather all the requirements correctly, in fact, if they were grading this assignment by automated testing, most of us would have failed. Who would have imagined that all the error messages needed to be displayed using error stream instead of standard output :)

I enjoyed this assignment because it was unconventional. It was creative, it was unforgettable. Through experience, I learned how important and difficult requirements gathering is. I wish all assignments were as interesting :)