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Learn to avoid some of the typical causes of project failure by investing in clearly outlining the requirements for all parties concerned. Outlined below are important items to keep in mind for successful requirements capture and recording:
1. There are three levels of requirements.
a. Business Requirements - High level objectives of the project which are recorded in the Vision and Scope Document
b. User Requirements - Task and facilities available to the end user recorded in the Use Cases.
c. Functional Requirements - Detailed listing out of each behavior that the software must exhibit. This along with the quality attributes and other non-functional requirements is documented in the Software Requirements Specification (SRS).
2. Involve the end-user or customers as much as possible during the requirements capture stage. Identify various user groups and one representative individual from each group for inputs regarding their specific requirements. They could also review prototypes and the SRS to ensure completeness and effectiveness.
3. Ensure that the requirements are quantifiable and measurable. Areas that are unclear may require more detailed analysis or even the development of a prototype. Developing Test cases early also help reveal any gaps in the requirements capture. Verify the completeness of the requirements by formally inspecting the documents generated.
4. Prioritize Requirements by their relative importance. This will help weed out high cost-low value functionality. It will also help in making informed and critical decisions when faced with time/ resource and functionality tradeoffs. Identify and remove any functionality which will not be used or which do not help meet any of the business objectives.
5. Ensure that the project scope is clearly defined in the Vision and Scope document. Expect some amount of requirements growth and buffer for it, since rarely is the project deadline changed, additional resources provided or any existing functionality deleted to compensate for it. Effectively using requirement gathering methods and base lining the requirements specifications also helps avoid scope creep. All parties involved must realize that future additions will add to the cost.
6. Establish and enforce a clear and realistic process for change management. Prioritize the proposed requirement changes against the requirements yet to be implemented. Ensure that each change and its impact are sufficiently analyzed to avoid unforeseen complexities and slipping project schedule and deadlines. Analyze associated costs and benefits and all the associated tasks and resource impacts. Also, be disciplined about following suitable version control policies to ensure that all the project participants are working on the latest requirements.
7. Finally, while it is important to have a complete set of requirements to start design and development, it is also important not to get bogged down at this stage. After a set of requirements has been fully identified, development can begin on this while unclear requirements continue to get analyzed and clearly defined. The iterative model or phased approach is better than the waterfall model in these cases.
Like any other set of engineering products, software products are also oriented towards the customer. It is either market driven or it drives the market. Customer Satisfaction was the buzzword of the 80's. Customer Delight is today's buzzword and Customer Ecstasy is the buzzword of the new millennium. Products that are not customer or user friendly have no place in the market although they are engineered using the best technology. The interface of the product is as crucial as the internal technology of the product.
Market Research A market study is made to identify a potential customer's need. This process is also known as market research. Here, the already existing need and the possible and potential needs that are available in a segment of the society are studied carefully. The market study is done based on a lot of assumptions. Assumptions are the crucial factors in the development or inception of a product's development. Unrealistic assumptions can cause a nosedive in the entire venture. Though assumptions are abstract, there should be a move to develop tangible assumptions to come up with a successful product.
Research and Development
Once the Market Research is carried out, the customer's need is given to the Research & Development division (R&D) to conceptualize a cost-effective system that could potentially solve the customer's needs in a manner that is better than the one adopted by the competitors at present. Once the conceptual system is developed and tested in a hypothetical environment, the development team takes control of it. The development team adopts one of the software development methodologies that is given below, develops the proposed system, and gives it to the customer.
The Sales & Marketing division starts selling the software to the available customers and simultaneously works to develop a niche segment that could potentially buy the software. In addition, the division also passes the feedback from the customers to the developers and the R&D division to make possible value additions to the product.
While developing a software, the company outsources the non-core activities to other companies who specialize in those activities. This accelerates the software development process largely. Some companies work on tie-ups to bring out a highly matured product in a short period.
Popular Software Development Models The following are some basic popular models that are adopted by many software development firms
A. System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Model
B. Prototyping Model
C. Rapid Application Development Model
D. Component Assembly Model
A. System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Model This is also known as Classic Life Cycle Model (or) Linear Sequential Model (or) Waterfall Method. This model has the following activities.
1. System/Information Engineering and Modeling
As software is always of a large system (or business), work begins by establishing the requirements for all system elements and then allocating some subset of these requirements to software. This system view is essential when the software must interface with other elements such as hardware, people and other resources. System is the basic and very critical requirement for the existence of software in any entity. So if the system is not in place, the system should be engineered and put in place. In some cases, to extract the maximum output, the system should be re-engineered and spruced up. Once the ideal system is engineered or tuned, the development team studies the software requirement for the system.
2. Software Requirement Analysis
This process is also known as feasibility study. In this phase, the development team visits the customer and studies their system. They investigate the need for possible software automation in the given system. By the end of the feasibility study, the team furnishes a document that holds the different specific recommendations for the candidate system. It also includes the personnel assignments, costs, project schedule, target dates etc.... The requirement gathering process is intensified and focussed specially on software. To understand the nature of the program(s) to be built, the system engineer or "Analyst" must understand the information domain for the software, as well as required function, behavior, performance and interfacing. The essential purpose of this phase is to find the need and to define the problem that needs to be solved .
3. System Analysis and Design
In this phase, the software development process, the software's overall structure and its nuances are defined. In terms of the client/server technology, the number of tiers needed for the package architecture, the database design, the data structure design etc... are all defined in this phase. A software development model is thus created. Analysis and Design are very crucial in the whole development cycle. Any glitch in the design phase could be very expensive to solve in the later stage of the software development. Much care is taken during this phase. The logical system of the product is developed in this phase.
4. Code Generation
The design must be translated into a machine-readable form. The code generation step performs this task. If the design is performed in a detailed manner, code generation can be accomplished without much complication. Programming tools like compilers, interpreters, debuggers etc... are used to generate the code. Different high level programming languages like C, C++, Pascal, Java are used for coding. With respect to the type of application, the right programming language is chosen.
5. Testing Once the code is generated, the software program testing begins. Different testing methodologies are available to unravel the bugs that were committed during the previous phases. Different testing tools and methodologies are already available. Some companies build their own testing tools that are tailor made for their own development operations.
6. Maintenance
The software will definitely undergo change once it is delivered to the customer. There can be many reasons for this change to occur. Change could happen because of some unexpected input values into the system. In addition, the changes in the system could directly affect the software operations. The software should be developed to accommodate changes that could happen during the post implementation period.
B. Prototyping Model
This is a cyclic version of the linear model. In this model, once the requirement analysis is done and the design for a prototype is made, the development process gets started. Once the prototype is created, it is given to the customer for evaluation. The customer tests the package and gives his/her feed back to the developer who refines the product according to the customer's exact expectation. After a finite number of iterations, the final software package is given to the customer. In this methodology, the software is evolved as a result of periodic shuttling of information between the customer and developer. This is the most popular development model in the contemporary IT industry. Most of the successful software products have been developed using this model - as it is very difficult (even for a whiz kid!) to comprehend all the requirements of a customer in one shot. There are many variations of this model skewed with respect to the project management styles of the companies. New versions of a software product evolve as a result of prototyping.
C. Rapid Application Development (RAD) Model The RAD model is a linear sequential software development process that emphasizes an extremely short development cycle. The RAD model is a "high speed" adaptation of the linear sequential model in which rapid development is achieved by using a component-based construction approach. Used primarily for information systems applications, the RAD approach encompasses the following phases:
1. Business modeling
The information flow among business functions is modeled in a way that answers the following questions:
What information drives the business process?
What information is generated?
Who generates it?
Where does the information go?
Who processes it?
2. Data modeling The information flow defined as part of the business modeling phase is refined into a set of data objects that are needed to support the business. The characteristic (called attributes) of each object is identified and the relationships between these objects are defined.
3. Process modeling The data objects defined in the data-modeling phase are transformed to achieve the information flow necessary to implement a business function. Processing the descriptions are created for adding, modifying, deleting, or retrieving a data object.
4. Application generation The RAD model assumes the use of the RAD tools like VB, VC++, Delphi etc... rather than creating software using conventional third generation programming languages. The RAD model works to reuse existing program components (when possible) or create reusable components (when necessary). In all cases, automated tools are used to facilitate construction of the software.
5. Testing and turnover Since the RAD process emphasizes reuse, many of the program components have already been tested. This minimizes the testing and development time.
D. Component Assembly Model
Object technologies provide the technical framework for a component-based process model for software engineering. The object oriented paradigm emphasizes the creation of classes that encapsulate both data and the algorithm that are used to manipulate the data. If properly designed and implemented, object oriented classes are reusable across different applicationsand computer based system architectures. Component Assembly Model leads to software reusability. The integration/assembly of the already existing software components accelerate the development process. Nowadays many component libraries are available on the Internet. If the right components are chosen, the integration aspect is made much simpler.
