Success through Visualization
The better the specs, the better the software. Visualization solutions help companies deliver the right software more efficiently.
By Emmet B. Keeffe III, iRise
Apr. 07, 2008
Today's challenging economic climate is keeping everyone on their toes. Companies must keep a close eye on their bottom line in order to keep operations running more efficiently than ever before. At the same time, customers are demanding more than ever from corporate applications.
Achieving a successful software deployment - the first time - is critical. Fine-tuning the development process to ensure satisfied customers and a manageable cost structure starts at the very beginning: the requirements process. New research shows that the better the requirements, the more successful the project.
The Requirements Challenge
Most companies struggle with the software development process. The main cause of problems is specifying what exactly the software will do.
Our company actually started out as a consultancy. We specialized in highly-interactive applications and actually built about 300 of them during that era. We quickly learned that the business analysis and requirements definition phase was the most excruciating part of any project.
Like most companies, we spent a lot of time writing text-based requirements and use cases in order to accurately capture business needs. We created process flow diagrams, screen shots, and more. Most of these requirements documents ended up anywhere from 50 to 500 pages.
Not surprisingly, when we sat down with our clients, we realized that it was impossible to review and interpret that level of detail. So after spending months to get through the requirements phase, the business didn't really know whether the requirements were correct when they signed off on it.
The end result was a tremendous amount of scope change as the project moved forward, which often lead to project delays and costs overruns.
Accurate Specs are Key
What we discovered is that we weren't the only ones experiencing the problem of poor communication between business and IT; the issue is actually quite pervasive in the industry. Whether on the enterprise side or in the halls of a particular software company, the challenge to accurately describe an application's look, feel and behavior so that it meets business needs the first time, is a significant one. The bottom line is that business people fundamentally have a hard time understanding text specifications, screen shots, static use cases and business process flow diagrams. And coded prototypes have proven to be too expensive and time consuming to produce; they often require a developer to be pulled off a project to produce.
Importantly, accuracy doesn't simply result in a faster time-to-market or lower development costs. Forrester Research reports "Better requirements definition practices reduce the number of defects and the amount of rework resulting from misunderstood requirements, misarticulated requirements, and unknown requirements."
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Achieving a successful software deployment - the first time - is critical. Fine-tuning the development process to ensure satisfied customers and a manageable cost structure starts at the very beginning: the requirements process. New research shows that the better the requirements, the more successful the project.
The Requirements Challenge
Most companies struggle with the software development process. The main cause of problems is specifying what exactly the software will do.
Our company actually started out as a consultancy. We specialized in highly-interactive applications and actually built about 300 of them during that era. We quickly learned that the business analysis and requirements definition phase was the most excruciating part of any project.
Like most companies, we spent a lot of time writing text-based requirements and use cases in order to accurately capture business needs. We created process flow diagrams, screen shots, and more. Most of these requirements documents ended up anywhere from 50 to 500 pages.
Not surprisingly, when we sat down with our clients, we realized that it was impossible to review and interpret that level of detail. So after spending months to get through the requirements phase, the business didn't really know whether the requirements were correct when they signed off on it.
The end result was a tremendous amount of scope change as the project moved forward, which often lead to project delays and costs overruns.
Accurate Specs are Key
What we discovered is that we weren't the only ones experiencing the problem of poor communication between business and IT; the issue is actually quite pervasive in the industry. Whether on the enterprise side or in the halls of a particular software company, the challenge to accurately describe an application's look, feel and behavior so that it meets business needs the first time, is a significant one. The bottom line is that business people fundamentally have a hard time understanding text specifications, screen shots, static use cases and business process flow diagrams. And coded prototypes have proven to be too expensive and time consuming to produce; they often require a developer to be pulled off a project to produce.
Importantly, accuracy doesn't simply result in a faster time-to-market or lower development costs. Forrester Research reports "Better requirements definition practices reduce the number of defects and the amount of rework resulting from misunderstood requirements, misarticulated requirements, and unknown requirements."
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