Documents every successful software project needs

When you start developing a software product, you need an idea of what you want each component of the software to do. From the part 1 in this series on defining products 3 Questions to define a software product, you now know the essential questions you need to ask to define your product. Today I’ll be doing part 2 that goes over how you document the requirements.

Knowing why, what and how your software product will be isn’t the end of the line for the product managers. You need prepare the documents, lists of requirements, UX modelling, etc. to make your development process easier. These, seems like a long process but it also serves over time as well.

If you don’t have your requirements straightened out, then how can you complete your project. And not just you, your developers will often want to freeze their development process based on some initial works of the definition. Once that is cleared out then proceed with development. Some call it the classic waterfall paradigm. This doesn’t work in any situation.

So, what can you do, keeping in mind you are the middle man, your failure to capture the whole product will affect both your customers and your developers?

You create baseline documents of the product you are planning to build.

Baseline Documents

Baseline Documents are documentations of a product that is formally reviewed, revised and accepted in their current forms, to serve as a detailed definition of what needs to be built. A simpler form of explaining would be to say a “blueprint” of the software that you will be developing. These documents may include the following types of requirement specifications:

• Functional requirements

• Non-functional (technical) requirements

Functional requirements

Functional requirement documents help SPMs to understand the characteristics of the product we need to build for our customers. As these types of documentations process helps us to capture the business of the product that the customers are asking for. As SPMs, if your goal is to capture the “why” there is a need of this product you are building and the “what” you can do to solve those needs, then this documentation approach is “THE” way to start.

Sometimes, functional requirements are also referred as “Business requirements”. And definitely don’t forget to share this document with your customers, as they need to confirm that this is what they want you to build. This document will detail the business end of the software product as well as the “requirements”. The requirements take the form of lists and with the help of UX specialists, you can show the outline on how it will work.

Technical requirements

Technical requirement documents will help to understand the “how” that “what” will be build. Someone with technical perspectives, like a software developer, or engineer, or architect, will need to understand the “what” you want him/her to build. They often don’t want to understand the business criteria of the product. But with their help you will be able to create a step-by-step instruction of the product. This will help you to understand the timeline to build and test the product before you release or hand it over to your customer.

Techies will have discussions with regarding the requirements that you have outlined for them to work on and you will go back-and-forth with which requirements have higher priorities and which have lower priorities, in terms for release planning.

The SRS

You can store both of these requirement documentation in to a singular document called the Software Requirement Specification (SRS) documentation. This will be helpful for the whole project as you can outline the requirements in priorities, from higher to lower, for the release plans. Developers will also be benefited from this document as it contains all.

Additionally, SRS documents can may also include several other software, hardware, stakeholders and interface requirement specification to fully define the baseline’s component. The goal is to provide customers and the developers with a clear understanding of exactly what is intended to go into the upcoming releases. This practice of storing requirements in a solution allows you to maintain an aggregated set of both present and future release commitments.

I’ll finish with WC’s tradition today of stealing and posting a Dilbert strip without feeling any sense of moral turpitude!