Chapter 31. Freelance Requirement Elicitation – A Guide for Feature Development

Imagine for a minute that you're a freelance developer who was handed a new feature to build by a client. Then picture yourself building an elegant feature, all the code working perfectly. You follow best practices and ensure that all the potential edge case scenarios are covered.

Now imagine that you're demoing the bright and shiny new feature to the client. But instead of telling you that you're the best developer in the world and they're going to name their first child after you, they look at the application confused, because what you built didn't match what they had in their mind at all.

This is a scenario that is played out all too often in the freelance development world. And in many cases, it's due to a poor requirement elicitation process. The story I just mentioned is not a made-up parable, it happened to me recently. And when I say recently, I mean yesterday...