Welcome to the forty-fifth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Requirements. In this edition, as an author, Graham explains requirements gathering so that teams stop making assumptions; Adrian tries to reconcile agile practitioners with requirement gathering; and in the Library section, Graham reviews a growing number of worker union-related titles.

If you ask many developers what a “user story” is, you will be told that it is a software requirement expressed using a prescribed formula: "As a category of person, I want to do a thing so that some goal is attained."

We keep talking and writing blog posts, recording podcasts, and publishing an edition of this magazine dedicated to requirements because most software engineers and managers have a conflicting relationship with them. Engineers and managers will complain that writing requirements down (even in small cards) is against the ethos of Agile (spoiler alert: it is not), while the same engineers and managers will blame project failure to, guess what? Insufficient or incomplete requirements. Shocker.