Requirements Determination is Unstoppable: An Experience Report

The paper describes the quotations gathered during interviews and focus groups during a consulting engagement to help the client improve its requirements engineering (RE) process. The paper describes also a model of the software lifecycle derived from a Michael Jackson quotation, a model that explains about 95% of the quotations that we gathered. In particular, it explains why basic requirements determination is unstoppable and how management attempts to stop RE lead to the phenomena that are described by the quotations and less than optimal requirements specifications.