How Single Sign-On Saved Me from Gathering Requirements

Quinn just announced that I’m speaking at San Francisco Perl Mongers this month, Sept 27th at 8:00pm.

The current talk is titled “Pizza and Single Sign-On.” I’d like to rename it “How Single Sign-On Saved Me from Gathering Requirements” but I think pizza is a bigger draw.

The talk will range from big multi-domain website-spanning Single Sign-Ons to simple shared authentication schemes that let you integrate somebody’s premanufactured wiki with your existing site. Before settling on integration of existing social software we’d dabbled in writing the software ourselves. The result was best summed up by Make publisher Dale Dougherty, “We don’t want to be blog developers.”

It’s a question of focus, not of expertise. Although we seemed capable of writing our own blog (or wiki or forum) software, doing so would mean focusing on the latest features and fads of said software. Keeping up with user’s expectations means a lot of requirements gathering. And we’d rather be focused on our real job, which is finding and publishing on new technologies.

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