You have a fantastic new app idea! You believe in the idea, live, breathe, and talk about it all the time. You have a clear vision of what it needs to be.
Let’s get it built. Sure, you say to yourself – I’ll make a list of features… I am good at making lists. How hard can it be?
As you start making your feature list, you realize that expressing your idea in words isn’t so easy. The minute details get missed and the vision you seem to have in your mind isn’t quite coming through.
Yet, you do power through your feature list and have your draft ready! Time to show it to your friends, potential vendors, or your team (in case you already have one).
Your feature list is received with a lot of questions, discussions tend to digress as your audience does not completely comprehend your ideas and vision. There is a gap in understanding between you and your audience for the vision of your idea, what it needs to be, and how to get there.
Documenting software project requirements for a software project can be daunting. If it is not comprehensive and clear It can not only be for you but also the stakeholders you are presenting it to.
How do you document your software project requirements? There is no clear answer to this. Every project is different, and so is your audience. With so many options and tools, how do you go about it?
Here are some Pro tips that will help you write, define your software project requirements better, and ensure that your idea reaches the audience it deserves.
Answer the Why, What, and How Questions for your next Software Project Requirements
It is important to capture all aspects of your requirements in detail from the perspective of all stakeholders.
The business needs have to be well defined and objectives spelled out clearly. Your audience needs to know the answer to why what and why questions –
WHY are you building this software?
A project summary (or executive summary) should be crisp and clear. It should immediately get the attention of the reader as to why this app is being built. What is the purpose of the project should be the driving factor for all subsequent decisions?
If you are preparing an RFP for seeking investment, this is your Vision and Mission statement. This is the “Why” for your project to be considered by stakeholders.
WHAT are the expectations?
Capturing “What your application goals are?”, is the next thing you need to do. This is the heart of the software project requirements definition and also needs the most time and detailing, this is what forms the Scope of Work for your team.
What is the delivery Platform?
With so many platforms and technologies available, choosing the form for your product or app is very important. You need to think from the perspective of your end users’ usage, convenience, as well as what resources you have at hand.
For example, for a mobile app development project, our customer wanted to go for Native app development. However, we ended up recommending the Hybrid Web-based Ionic Framework – Why?
- The features they wanted was easy to achieve in a Hybrid app without performance issues
- They already had a web (angular) application for desktop – this code we leveraged for the Ionic (Angular) app development
If you are going multiplatform you will also need the skills and budget accordingly.
Observing your competition and doing a market survey is also an important research area. Providing references in your RFP of similar apps helps your development team determine the choice of platforms and what the market needs are.
Defining your audience
Identifying the target audience for your software is the first step when starting the functional requirements definition of an RFP.
Knowing the various types of users of your app allows you to define the journeys of each type in your app. Scoping of all the possible user journeys (using User Stories) is an exhaustive but effective technique to capture functional requirements.
It also allows you to set goals for the UI/UX team so they can have personas defined for the users.
What are the Features of the app?
Detailing Functional requirements takes time and effort. It is important to have them well detailed and at the same time easy to follow. Here are some techniques that will help you cover the functional requirements effectively.
Making User Stories
User Stories are a great way to define functional requirements. You must create stories from the perspective of all user types identified in the previous step.
They need to be atomic, and exhaustive. This means that you break up your user’s journeys into smaller tasks that would lead to a single, meaningful and complete action. Atomic user stories allow your development team to estimate effort better and also identify risks and concerns at a micro-level.
User Stories are compatible with an Agile Development Methodology which is arguably one of the best ways to approach software development projects.
User Stories are a great way to define functional requirements. You must create stories from the perspective of all user types identified in the previous step.
They need to be atomic, and exhaustive. This means that you break up your user’s journeys into smaller tasks that would lead to a single, meaningful and complete action. Atomic user stories allow your development team to estimate effort better and also identify risks and concerns at a micro-level.
User Stories are compatible with an Agile Development Methodology which is arguably one of the best ways to approach software development projects.
Creating Wireframes
One of the best ways to describe your user flows and features is to have a UI mockup or a workflow diagram.
Wireframes when done well can be immensely helpful in bringing all the stakeholders together on the same page. Wireframing tools can not only be used to create high-level visual aides to describe your system architecture (using flow charts and diagrams) but also to create detailed user interfaces mockups with navigational links, to provide the stakeholders with a better understanding of what to expect from the end product.
We have had a lot of success in using wireframes to document user experience and complex workflows on projects, especially with everyone working remotely in the current pandemic situation.
Quality Benchmarks
The setting of Testing and Quality benchmarks is often missed out in the requirements definition. Sometimes, it is assumed that all stakeholders are on the same page with regards to quality expectations and hence they are never clearly stipulated. This more often than not leads to misunderstandings and hampers project completion and sign-off.
Quality standards, acceptance criteria, testing methodology – manual, automation, unit testing frameworks, and load testing are all important aspects that need to be talked about and defined at the software project requirements definition stage.
Making your application testing friendly is important, as your development and tech stack design would be dependent on this.
Compliance
Compliance (privacy/security) aspects is also a very important “What” question you need to cover. If these are not discussed early in the project, they can result in considerable rework and pain to adhere to once your design and development have progressed.
Regulatory compliance required for your application should be specified as part of your software project requirements. For example –
- If you intend to have a web-based application catering to users in Europe, GDRP guidelines are an essential regulatory compliance requirement.
- In India, there are strict SMS regulation compliance requirements that need to adhere to.
Such regulatory requirements can be critical to defining the nature of your product/service and may incur significant effort and time to develop for. Make sure these aspects are covered well.
HOW to get there?
The “How” are implementation and core development-related questions. This will define your choice of resources, technology stack, project management style, and so on. This will define how your team will run the project on a day-to-day basis.
Technology requirements
Here you discuss aspects like – technology stack to be used (if you are bound to any), or whether your app will have push notifications, or will your app need location tracking, and so on.
This is an extension of the What is the delivery Platform? section. As mentioned earlier, this needs careful consideration to arrive at decisions such as –
- Do you need a web (desktop) app, mobile app, or both?
- If you are creating a backend service, then the choice of databases – relational, non-relational, or graph?
- What would be the front-end framework – Angular, React, or Vue?
- Is my middleware going to be PHP, Java, NodeJs, or Python?
Weigh out the pros and cons, or list down your questions in your RFP and let your technology partner help you arrive at a decision.
Here is a great article that dives deeper into how to choose your tech stack.
Resources and Skill Needed
If you know what skills and resources would be needed upfront that would be great for getting estimates on cost. For example, if your project uses a legacy technology such as a mainframe or a tech stack like Ruby on Rails for which skilled people are difficult to find, please include this in your RFP.
(This is optional if you are inviting a vendor who would be responsible for providing a turnkey solution)
Defining Phases
Common mistake program managers make for software development projects is to plan the software project to have a one-time big push to get all the features out before go-to-market.
Software development is best done in smaller iterative cycles. Identify what the MVP is, for your project and business, to go to market and start with that for your first phase. Subsequent features could be added in phased development cycles (planned Sprints).
Sprint-based development allows you to plan and budget your resources well. It also allows you to course-correct with user feedback and any other market changes.
To define your MVP, yet create your exhaustive list of features too – so that your team can provide for those while designing the architecture. However, create a phase-wise plan and break your releases with incremental feature additions.
Define Cost Centers
While the actual development may still be your most important cost center, you also need to factor in other costs (and who will bear those – you or your vendor/partner) at the software project requirements stage. These would include –
- Licensing costs for 3rd party software or libraries, such as Database or OS licenses
- Infrastructure costs for a domain, hosting, cloud services can be significant. These need to be identified and included in your budget or the vendors budget at the onset of starting the project
- Marketing – Consumer applications such as apps going to the apps store need significant marketing budgets – typically much more than your development costs. Identifying your marketing channels and budgets for marketing needs attention as well
- Customer Support – Whether it is a consumer application or an internal Platform for your business, users will always require support to use the system. Creating a channel for user issue reporting, setting SLAs for responding to them and assigning responsibilities for resolution are very important aspects that need to be discussed with your development partner. The success of your project heavily depends on the quality of user support post-go-live. Developing a great piece of software that users will not use due to lack of support or one that has operational challenges defeats the project purpose.
- Maintenance – Just like support, future maintenance for your application must be discussed with your development team. This would include upgrades and bug fixes for the application, as well as DevOps and Infrastructure support.
Tools You Must Try
Using the right tools can really help you deliver your ideas in the best possible way. Here are some of my favourite tools I have found very useful when working on software project requirements definition and proposals too.
How to Capture User Stories
You could write your user stories using traditional word processors and spreadsheets – however, it can become very complex to track related user stories and dependencies between them. Using Agile tools can be really helpful in user story creation. Here are some popular tools which you could try –
Using Work-Breakdown Structure
A Work-Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a great way of documenting software project requirements for your development team.
- The goal of a WBS is to breakdown complex software project requirements into smaller manageable parts which are easy for the team to estimate and deliver
- It also makes it easier for stakeholders to understand the requirements better as it is broken down into smaller focussed pieces.
- Makes arriving at a Statement of Work easier
- Here is a great article by Pavel Kukhnavets that explains how a WBS is useful and how to create one
How to Create Wireframes
Ideally, having a good UI/UX designer along with an analyst would be ideal to design the wireframes but if you want to give it a shot yourself, here are some tools that are great and super easy to get started with the basics.
AdobeXD and Figma are excellent to create impressive wireframes as they allow you to add real UI components, user events, and transitions (for multiple device types).
diagrams.net is another free tool you can use to create UI mockups and diagrams. They also have a presentation mode that allows you to share your wireframes easily via a link to your audience.
Conclusion
That sums up my learnings so far. Remember that there is no absolute right and wrong process to go about your software project requirements definition and gathering. You would need to find a balance between what covers customer needs, team comfort, and the time/effort you have available.
The tools and techniques listed are a good start, but you should and will need to customize how you use them to suit your needs.
Are there any more ideas and tools you have found useful? Would love to know your thoughts in the comments section.
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