Taoism tells us that it is practically impossible to understand the world fully. Everything we describe falls short of what it actually is, since our language is limited. We naturally want to see things as complete, but everything is part of a wider whole that we are incapable of relating accurately and completely.

The way to understand the world is through continual contemplation. We actually begin to understand by comprehending what we have not yet understood.
A waterfall approach to gathering requirements would therefore be anathema to a Taoist. How can you say a requirement is complete without understanding how it will be met, or indeed what it will look like once its complete, or if the requirement was correct to start off with?

Requirements, design and implementation are part of the same whole: what the project will deliver. Instead of engaging in a futile activity to capture every requirement before you move on to designing how you’ll meet them, you need to engage the whole team in assessing what a requirement really looks like tangibly in the target system. That means discovering the requirement, prototyping and reviewing through a series of iterations, until the feature meets its objectives. These are the principles of agile development.

The subtlety of individual requirements is almost impossible to capture in a strict, documented fashion. If you want to see your requirements met, rather than your project brief adhered too, a more contemplative and iterative approach is necessary.

More on China and WCM to follow.