Softerware Consulting

Requirements Writing

“If you don’t know where you’re going any road will do.”

I work with clients who “want a website.” This is akin to working with a contractor and telling him you “want a house.” If you’re not specific then any house will do. But you wanted three bedrooms? And a two car garage? The devil’s in the details.

Writing clearly defined requirements is the single most important thing you can do to ensure your project, website, or software application works the way you want it to.

Requirements are descriptive of the features and functions that make your website or software unique. They describe how things work- the means an end user will take to accomplish his or her goals. Requirements should describe in enough detail the system. Requirements allow you to:

Accurately estimate the cost of the project
Prioritize features based on schedule and budget
Assess whether the end product does what it was intended to do
Clarify all aspects of the system and remove ambiguity
Inform your QA and test plans
Protect against scope creep by clearly defining the boundaries of the project
Instill confidence in the developers and engineers that you actually know what you want and what’s expected of them

One can make a distinction between “business requirements” and “functional requirements” but this doesn’t mean that multiple documents need to be created. Business requirements ensure the rules of the business are accounted for (e.g. Priority Overnight Letters can not be more than 10 ounces) and functional requirements ensure the inner workings of the system produce a certain results (e.g. a new registration will generate a welcome email after the email address has been successfully verified).

Corporations are notorious for creating massive requirements documents that take hundreds of man-hours to write, edit, revise, approve, etc. The truth is that requirements can take a myriad of forms: Word documents, Google docs, wiki pages, etc.

Regardless of their form the most important thing to remember when creating requirements is that they are clear and leave no room for ambiguity. They should be succinct, simple statements and contain no more than one idea or function. This is crucial since the requirements will directly impact your development, design, and marketability of your product.

Whether you’re creating a new mobile application or the next social networking website do yourself and your developers a favor and create a requirements document. There’s no better way to ensure success than through clear thinking, workable boundaries, and a well-defined goal in mind.

Need help with requirements? I’ve worked with clients for fourteen years helping to define and document requirements.

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