What’s the number one way you can be sure your investment in custom business application software is going to achieve your company’s objectives? Ensure your software development team understands what you need.
Defining requirements is challenging, so it’s tempting to skip it. Yet without written clear requirements, your chances of building great business application software are slim.
Since 1988, DragonPoint’s sole purpose has been designing, coding, and supporting business application software systems. We deliver on time and in budget projects, but we’ve followed many unsuccessful attempts. Based on our 30+ years in business, we’re happy to share our clients’ lessons learned and how to avoid challenges they faced.
How do you and your software development team create requirements that work? By avoiding the following common pitfalls.
- Assuming you and the developers understand your business process – click here to read about the dangers of creating software before identifying process strengths and areas for improvement.
- Not putting requirements in writing – don’t assume everybody will remember what you need (click to read more)
- Having the wrong person write requirements – click to find out how to identify the right person
- Not starting with pictures, which is covered below
Pitfall 4: Not starting with pictures
While words are a critical part of defining business application software requirements, supplementing the words with pictures is equally important.
Pictures of software screens are often called mockups or wireframes. They visually represent the pages to be coded and are an inexpensive way for you to agree on how a screen should look. Changing the layout of a screen in a mockup is exponentially less expensive than retrofitting working code. This means that investing in mockups saves you money. Pictures also increase the probability of ending up with a business application software solution that meets your needs.
Putting the mockups on a whiteboard in your office won’t result in great software. The mockups must be incorporated into the requirements document and associated with specific tasks.
For example, most systems require an administrative page to manage users. Because we’ve all created logins to online applications, you may think your developers know exactly what you need. But what if your business has unique requirements? For example, what if you want your managers to add and update information about only their employees? Does that look different than allowing all administrators to manage all employees?
Maybe you want to see specific high-level information about your employees on the main page, with little used information on secondary pages. You need to see how the screen will look with all the information you’re requesting.
Do you want search parameters at the top of the page and a list of users that match the search at the bottom? Or do you want to see search fields on the left and results on the right?
Seeing a picture of the screen that will be coded often prompts people to ask, “What about …?” What about searching for users based on their manager’s name? What about searching by employee ID in addition to name?
It takes time, but changing a drawing is a lot less expensive than changing a coded page.
To avoid this pitfall, insist on mockups of screens.
Creating successful mockups requires many of the same skills necessary for writing a great requirements document.
- Interviewing subject matter experts to understand how they need pages to work to maximize efficiency.
- Understanding the big picture and detailed requirements to ensure the user interface and functionality are consistent throughout the system, which minimizes training requirements.
- Translating business requirements into screens and functions that will be coded by the software development team.
- Working as part of a team.
- Communicating information from the subject matter experts into mockups.
- Reviewing the mockups with the business team to confirm understanding and ensure the coded pages will meet business needs.
- Insisting that the person creating your mockups has experience in designing user interfaces for business application software systems.
If your requirements include detailed mockups, you won’t have any surprises when you get the first set of working code for your new system.
Can you successfully create custom business application software?
Successful custom business application software projects are possible if you start with strong requirements that clearly define the system that will meet your business needs.
Of course, great requirements alone don’t guarantee great software. You also need a strong experienced project manager; skilled, qualified developers; testers who catch every detail; and a support team that prioritizes your success.
If you’d like more information about DragonPoint’s successful business application software development projects and our team, please email sales@dragonpoint.com or call 321-631-0657.
