Requirements, designs and pink chairs...

Summary
You can’t always get what you want, But if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need

A customer comes into your carpentry shop and asks for a pink chair. You’ve been to a good requirements course and immediatelly think “Aha! That’s a design constraint, not a requirement!”. And you might be right.

Perhaps his requirement is really “I want to buy a chair that my wife will like” and he thinks pink is his best bet. And, if you happen to know his wife’s taste better than he does, you might actually be able to suggest pistacchio as a nicer color and get away with it.

But if you really don’t know for sure, you’re better of just giving him the pink chair he’s asking for…