Requirements

We had an admin interface from which people could download an Excel report. One day, we got a mail saying that the report format is Excel version so and so and it does not work with new Excel versions. The scramble began to find out which version of Excel was used, which version our app produced, how we can upgrade the library the app uses to create Excel documents to the latest version etc. For people not in the know, it is a pain to programatically work with any Microsoft office format in Java, you invariably feel like pulling your hairs out. In the middle of all this madness, I asked a simple question, instead of creating the document in excel format, why do not we create it as CSV? The report consumers were neutral, they were like we do not care as long as we can open it in excel.

As programmers, a lot of times, we blindly work on product requirements without questioning the intention behind them. As it was in our case, the person who gave the Excel requirement did not have any idea as to the difference in the amount of work one would have to put in to create an Excel report versus a CSV, nor the technical debt of the two approaches. From his perspective, it was all the same.

When a requirement comes to you, take a step back and go through them, see if there are chances to simplify. If some of the requirements sound absurd to you, tell it to the stake holder, if some of them might take a long time to implement, talk to him about this. The person providing the requirement has absolutely no idea that some of these features might be technically difficult to pull off or take a long time to implement or there is a better alternative that might not meet the criteria strictly but will not take eons to implement. Bias towards action is good, but a trigger happy one hurts everyone.