That's the idea behind Steerway: a tool for prototyping and discovering requirements through hands-on trials. We quickly throw together a prototype and climb the saddle to find out what actually matters. Does it go well downhill? Do the brakes bite? The requirements keep pace with what the riding reveals.
An example
A retail chain decides to build its first bike and brings in an engineering firm. A business analyst sets out to document every conceivable interaction between bike and rider. The cyclist will of course want, among other things, the front wheel to rotate about the z-axis in response to input at the handlebars, thereby allowing the direction of travel to be influenced during operation. A hundred-odd similar use cases later, the client and the firm settle on a timeline and a budget.
Six months on, the first container of bikes arrives. The chain's marketing director swings eagerly into the saddle for a test ride — and promptly goes over the bars. The handlebars and front wheel turn opposite ways.
The one detail that they must turn the same way was so obvious nobody thought of it, let alone wrote it down.
That's how tacit knowledge usually dies in requirements work, no matter how sharp the people doing it.
The example sounds absurd, but anyone who's worked with software will wince in recognition. However careful you are, jaw-dropping misses tend to surface only when people start using the thing. Actually, you'd be better off using the system before writing the spec for it.
Instead of grinding through specs and documents up front, you feel your way forward in real time. The specification falls out of the exploration, not the other way around. Problems and opportunities surface fast — and you deal with them on the spot.
AI helps turn your idea into small, testable requirements — concrete enough to build, small enough to try out one at a time.
AI implements each requirement and verifies it against the spec, so what reaches you actually works.
You take the prototype for a ride. Does it steer the way you imagined? This is where the real requirements show themselves.
Your feedback is implemented right away — and any gaps it reveals are amended in the requirements there and then. Spec and product never drift apart.
Have a project in mind, or want to see Steerway in action? I'd love to hear from you.
kristoffer@steerway.se