In my experience, it's a complete myth that requirement gathering can be done in a box.
"Requirement gathering" is almost always influenced by technical capabilities. All but the simplest projects, require back and forth with guestimates about the direction and approach.
This is because its difficult to decouple the code from the requirements. And the full requirements are never contained within a doc. So you need an engineer to look at the code to see how its done. This is going to change.
So someone who doesn’t understand code is going to know whether some AI generated description/summary of existing code is accurate, without being able to verify that in anyway? And then create requirements based on that summary? I use GPT-4 as a coding assistant pretty much every day, but it a. makes mistakes or strange assumptions all the time b. can’t parse the logic of or describe complex codebases c. fails to account for obvious edge cases, like an array being empty instead of populated. I mean, maybe some companies will do this, but I hope never have to use their products or they contain any sensitive information.
Again, where do you guys work? Maybe lets not use software engineering. If I asked you today, to do requirements gathering for building a bridge across the Mississippi river, could you do it? Don't you think you would have to learn about materials, regulations, land procurement, tensile and compression strengths and all the tradeoffs of the above? And once you learned all of that and you can finally present the requirements, would it be fair to call you non-technical?
I have to strongly disagree with this. If someone non-technical does the requirements gathering, the requirements will be incomplete. Developers will then either assume their own requirements or, if they’re thorough and good at their job, check these assumptions with the business. Either way, this wastes the company’s time. Either the assumed requirements will require re-work or the company has paid two employees to do the same job that should’ve been done by one.
"Requirement gathering" is almost always influenced by technical capabilities. All but the simplest projects, require back and forth with guestimates about the direction and approach.