I’ve spent the weekend effectively retiring the Software Requirements Booster, something I would not have imagined to be necessary so soon, especially since it sold well and performed even better.
Agile development, combined with offshore teams, presented a cocktail of unprecedented dysfunction: physically distanced developers, those with English as a second language, attempting to navigate the complexity and nuances of the onshore organisation — something even the locals struggled with.
Features that missed the mark, production outages, and mountains of technical debt. It was always going to be chaos. Nothing the senior managers cared enough about not to offshore. Five developers for the price of two. What a bargain! The mythical man month nowhere to be seen. Agile development, combined with offshore teams, presented an unprecedented opportunity — an opportunity I knew how to capitalise on.
And that, my friend, was why I created the Software Requirements Booster and how I got out of the six-month contracting business. Walk into a client with an offshore team, point out the obvious structural weaknesses, then help them build a better technical bridge between the business domain and the offshore developers 5,000 miles away. The very essence of Technical Business Analysis.
Unfortunately, all good stories must come to an end.
This one did when instead of writing very technical stories myself, I decided to write an AI agent to do that for me. Because I was curious, and because as an ex-developer I could. The result was quite incredible. I don’t mean ‘produce a generic backlog using a pre-trained model’, rather ‘feed in backend corporate and client data and make useful sense of it’.
What’s being produced automatically by the AI agent is really quite remarkable, and to an ‘80% complete’ standard (nb. my heuristic only).
- Product investment decisions
- Management risk reports
- Developer user stories
- Testing scenarios
- Scaffolded automated tests
- First line support manuals
Am I worried about my job?
Yes, at least when it comes to being a technical BA hand-crafting user stories. Plenty of work will remain for a while, I suspect, but that ship has now sailed its maiden voyage. And probably quite rightly so.
After all, “developer-ready user stories” were never the goal. They were a workaround — a behavioural hack to survive low-cost offshore development teams.
So farewell, Software Requirements Booster. You were great and long may you live in our memories. Enter left of stage:
Better Software Booster 🚀
A rapid tune-up a for delivery teams facing production outages, rework, and delays. No longer constrained to software requirements. Every part of your software development process will be reviewed, and then boosted, by the best of modern AI. Welcome to better software.
PS. Not to be confused with ‘vibe coding’, something we don’t condone.