Requirements are expectations. They serve as a description of what company stakeholders expect a software application to do. Requirements analysis (or requirements gathering) is the process of creating requirements, or determining expectations. Not only is requirements analysis a mandatory part of the software development process, but this process also forces stakeholders to communicate and reach consensus on the purpose, operation, goals, and overall expectations of the software application to be built.
In practice, requirements analysis is often skipped, or not enough analysis time is allowed for the overall size and scope of the application to be built. The naïve mentality behind these decisions is that money is better spent developing working software rather than a pile of paperwork. Research shows that shortchanging requirements analysis ultimately leads to late, over-budget projects—or, in some cases, complete project failure. It should not be surprising that successful software development requires not just a vision and talented software engineers, but also a comprehensive description of the use cases, features, visual appearance, and other detail.
Prolifogy performs a requirements analysis for all internal software projects. However, we also offer requirements analysis as a standalone service for clients who don’t have this expertise yet understand the need for this important step prior to committing time and money toward design and implementation.
This service includes:
- Conducting interviews with major stakeholders in order to determine and understand audience, scope, overall software goals, and major business problems to be solved
- Understanding audience, scope, and overall software goals
- Understanding major business problems to be solved
- Identifying business use cases
- Identifying all actors and roles that will to interact with the solution
- Identifying non-actor inputs and outputs
- Assessing customer expectations
- Creating a requirements document, suitable for software development use and RFPs
To learn more about how Prolifogy’s requirements analysis service can help your organization develop on-time, on-budget software applications, contact us now via our web site or call us at (855) 776-5436.