Hey Folks,
as I'm working a lot with our documentation I found pages the were at the first 
glance outdated. Today when I came home from office reading some of the mails 
around the CA dropped frames - hardware - whatever issues I got the opinion 
that outdated is the wrong description - we wrote them from the wrong point of 
view and we use terms we all know well but everybody has his own understanding 
what he means. It's one of the major problems in requirements engineering (RE). 
To illustrate it, please look at [1] (german server, english texts). (This 
cartoon is an important element in most of the RE certifications)

I would like to keep the example of the CA. And we should ask ourselves, what 
are the information the adopter has in his mind when he goes to the reference 
hardware page and what are the pitfalls we run into day by day. 

In general he would say "I want to record lectures". In his mind he got more 
specific ideas how this recording will join on and what the result of the 
recording is. This thought will be affected for example by an existing system 
that should be replaced, recordings he saw in the wild on youtube or iTunes 
that could be recorded with Matterhorn or any other system and so on.

Same with our day by day work. We talk about 

*"successful recordings"  (Framerate, resolution, size, devices, ...)
* Purchasable hardware (in North America, Europe, everywhere, ...)

So the language bites us (free translated by myself). We should talk more 
precise, using a glossary .. 

And my approach would be to create the landing page for our different modules 
which bases on the adopters requirements. The first thing that came into my 
mind is the quality of the video. That determines the hardware specs so they 
can be grouped by 3 or 4 target qualities and the adopter can watch examples 
and decide which hardware he needs.

This is an easy approach to safe time for answering questions on the users list 
caused by different meaning. 

Just my two cents and a small example, please give me some feedback for kind of 
an e-mail brainstorming (I will nor answer this week to stay away from a 
discussion, we could to this later on)

Regards
Nils

[1] http://interface-gmbh.de/Anforderungen_WAS_aus_Pj_wurde.JPG  


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