I currently work in the IT dept of a small company. Our team consists of 5-7 people. We do not have business analysts & our projects are all reverse engineered & started without requirements.
Because of that, we accept many kinds of projects from different fields & I am currently facing a huge issue where our client wants us to build an Accounting Software. So in this case our project manager gives us a sample Accounting Software & we are tasked to study the behavior & gather requirements ourselves in order for us to develop such software.
The issue is that I don't know accounting at all. I have to spend a lot of time learning & guessing how the given software works. I don't think I can even make the deadline at this rate. I don't know if this is the right way to do things.
Our past projects weren't successful at all & I'm beginning to doubt whether I'm a capable developer myself after spending more than 3 years in this particular company & experiencing such project failures.
So as the title says, do many companies do things this way?