Tips for Developing Your Enterprise Software Requirements

Tips for Developing Your Enterprise Software Requirements

Last Updated: November 17, 20233.2 min readCategories: Business & IT Leadership, Custom Software Development, Technical & Development
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Tips for Developing Your Enterprise Software Requirements from QAT Global

How to Create Enterprise Software Requirements That Have All the Right Details

 

When you make the decision that your current software isn’t working for you anymore or you know you need something custom, the first thing you need to do is put together a list of requirements to start the discussion with. It sounds simple enough, but actually sitting down to write them up can be more challenging than you might think. Trying to figure out all of the requirements you need for your enterprise software may seem like an impossible task. Just when you think you have cracked the code, you find you’ve missed yet another piece of critical functionality. Technology requirements need to be pretty detailed to produce your desired results. Here are some helpful tips to develop a comprehensive list of enterprise software requirements.

  • Define the Purpose – It never hurts to go back to the basics. Figure out what the purpose of the enterprise software truly is. Be able to answer the “who, what, when, where, and why” questions and that will help you discover “how” you will meet those basic requirements. This will give you a broad scope of what your software will need to provide, in order to accomplish your desired results.
  • Ask Users – The users are one of the most important pieces when discovering what enterprise software requirements to implement. They will be the ones that will be using and interacting with the software. There are typically two types of users that provide different but important views on requirements.
    • Hands-on users: Typically those who will depend on the software on a daily basis. The software is typically a critical part of their job. They are more detail-oriented about requirements.
    • Management users : have a broad view and able to see future requirements
  • Analyze, Analyze, Analyze – Detailed business process analysis and optimization can really help you find what is critical for your business process. This detailed analysis will allow you to find and eliminate any unnecessary steps in your process for peak efficiency.
  • Focus on What, Not How – Think about functionality in terms of what tasks you need to be able to do. Describe what you need to do versus focusing on how you will do it. Include details on key elements. In Agile, these are called user stories and they help developers design the software so that it works optimally.
  • Prioritize What’s Most Important – Rank the list of requirements on what is most important for your enterprise software. Have the users rate the list of requirements. This will give you a good comprehensive list of what requirements are needed and will be most successful.
  • Be Flexible – Despite all of your efforts to flush out all of the requirements before starting the development of the new enterprise software, there will still be things that will be missed. Agile development provides the flexibility that will be needed to accommodate the additional functionality.

Drafting a list of enterprise software requirements is a challenging task. Keeping an open mind and drawing from multiple resources will help you develop a well-rounded list of requirements. By doing a thorough job of constructing a comprehensive list of requirements upfront will alleviate some of the headache on the back end. There are always going to be more requirements and elements that will need to be implemented post-development. Being able to discover the needed changes and adapt the software is a necessary part of maintaining an excellent product that delivers the required capabilities for users. QAT Global offers a number of services to help you in any phase of enterprise software development. Through using an Agile approach, we ensure transparency, reliability, flexibility, speedy time-to-market, and quality results.

More details at:
Agility RPM – A Repeatable Process Methodology for Software Development
Enterprise Application Integration

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