What's the most effective way to get at the most important requirements for a project?

How should you begin eliciting the requirements? At one extreme, you might decide on a 100-percent hands-on approach: just sit down and write the requirements for the business stakeholders, and ask for their signatures. Or, at the other extreme, you could go totally hands-off and ask the stakeholders wide-open questions like, "What do you want?"

Extreme strategies like these are rarely successful. Handing the stakeholders a blank page is likely to elicit more irritation than valid results, and leave you still wondering what truly matters the most. But presuming to know everything and writing the requirements yourself is equally unlikely to get you an accurate requirements list.

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