A comprehensive understanding of what your clients and users need is the decisive factor in system development. Ever more frequently, architects and developers are granted the dubious pleasure of confronting requirement-donors and being responsible for ascertaining requirements.

But do you know how to best identify and extract all the conscious, unconscious and subconscious requirements your users and stakeholders harbor? Modern requirements engineering methods offer a variety of alternatives to cumbersome interviews and lengthy specifications.

When trying to galvanize the users and complete projects in "internet-time", the correct and intelligent use of investigative techniques is a key competence. If the requirements are fragmentary, unspecific, unclear or just plain nonexistent - guess who gets to pay the bill: the architect. It does thus really pay off to actively warrant that all the requirements have been collected in a professional fashion, that the specification is thorough and the wordings exact.

The knowledge collected must then be documented, in order to guarantee its readability, feasibility and serviceability. Using examples, the lecture will illustrate how to check if all the most important ideas of the stakeholders where accounted for in the specification and if the document is airtight or just another air bubble.