Requirements - The Developer's Perspective

Benefits of Clear Requirements

Developers can benefit from clear requirements by being able to design and build confident that they are creating what is really needed, confident that that they will not be involved later in wasteful and expensive re-work.

Have Your Say

Developers need to be involved in the specification of requirements. In our opinion, the ideal in many situations is to establish multi-disciplinary teams, where architects, designers and programmers can work with business analysts, users and testers to discover verifiable requirements and specify them to a level appropriate to the perceived degree of risk. At the very least, developers should act as reviewers prior to the requirements being ‘frozen’ and put under change management.

Requirements - How Much? How Formal? How Agile?

It can depend on such things as familiarity with the business, the organisation, the problem and your co-workers. It can depend too on the perceived level of risk, novelty, complexity and size of the product being built. And above all, it depends on the skill of the people.

Whilst it is impossible to be prescriptive, we believe that you should have just enough requirements documentation and formality. We believe also that architects, designers and programmers should work with the analysts, the testers and the business users and should have a major role in determining when there has been enough requirements elicitation, analysis and specification.

These 'developers' should be involved from the earliest stages in requirements work, assessing the technical feasibility of what is being requested and ensuring that a system really can be built for proposed budgets and with the proposed resources. Requirements should not be signed off until the developers have had their say and have confirmed that a solution is achievable. Estimates should be based on designs rather than requirements. In short, we believe that success comes from great people in great teams.

Getting Started

Why not learn more about our holistic approach to requirements? For more information, please contact us or take one of our training courses.