Find the clear and concise requirements for the software products

Requirement analysis is the hardest part of any software development life cycle. You could not create the right solution for the customer if you do not find the correct requirement and its specification. And that’s where all software projects failed.

You have an idea, and believe me, you do not have many clear and concise requirements. And the development team can not transform them into a software product. The idea is merely a core concept of the application. Your product will be more valuable if the core concept is better than others.

But your application requires more than a core concept. You sell an application based on a core concept, but your customers value it based on its feature design and ease of use. Despite having good ideas, many software projects fail because of a lack of clear and concise requirements.

Finding the requirements for the software products – web application product, single-page application product, a mobile application, desktop application, or any other software automation tools – requires attentive collaboration. You and the software architect need to discuss the requirements in detail unless you have a good grasp of why your product should be that specific way.

As a software architect, I know the importance of clear and concise requirements. These requirements led me to create flexible software designs.

For example; You need custom furniture, and you call a carpenter. He asks you several questions, and you also give him lots of information about why you need it in that way. The carpenter takes all dimensions, surroundings, and all the corners. Then he designs the furniture based on all the data. 

On the other hand, you give very little information to a software architect or software development team for creating software design. We need all information about your business idea so that these led to creating probably correct software design and we can develop it. 

In my software development career, I have come across many clients who had the core idea. And they did not have much information about the software product other than this. And I still find similar clients. They come with an idea without any detail and ask me to create a valuable product.

It requires good experience and technical knowledge to filter a good idea. And then build requirements out of it. During these years and working with many clients, I have created some guidelines to follow whenever I have to develop a requirement specification document for the client’s idea. And I am going to tell you three primary guidelines in the following sections so that you could create good requirement documents for the software development team.

Similarity with the existing software products

It is the first-best guideline to explore and elaborate on the requirements. You can not create an idea from anything. All software ideas are derivative of some other ideas. Sometimes, you manage to join two or three ideas, and sometimes, you apply one domain idea into another domain.

As soon as an idea strikes, you should find the existing similar products. Once you find those products, then you can start writing down all requirements from them. Most of the time, you get all requirements from these projects, and sometimes, you want all the features but for another domain.

The step moves you in the right direction. You can filter all the requirements, and you can also validate your idea against the existing products. Maybe, you do not want to duplicate the product for the domain.

Differences in the existing software products

It is the second-best guideline. As mentioned above, an idea is derivative of other ideas. And therefore, you can explore these existing ideas and find the requirements. This guideline allows you to find the differences between your software idea and others software ideas. Why does the customer bother to switch from the current solution to another similar product?

And answering this question will give you more information about the software requirements.

For example; My client asked me to create an email newsletter utility program that sends a newsletter email to all paid subscribers at the scheduled time. He gave me similar websites; Mailchimp.

I asked him what he wants from the site, and he told me the template design feature, newsletter feature, and management feature.

Then, I asked him what he did not want from the site, and he told me all the analytic features. He did not want to have any log into the utility program.

My development team saved a lot of human hours during development. The solution was simple, and it does not collect any usage analytics.

Explore unique requirements

After answering the above two questions, you could think about the unique requirements that make your product unique across the existing solutions. The answer gives you more information than the above two answers. Why?

Because and I guess you do not want to duplicate or copy the existing solution. Your idea should be unique and different from the concept. Otherwise, your product could not prove valuable to your customers.

And you should pay more attention to these details. It may require a different development methodology. I mean, you can not just start working on it like any other requirements. You may need to involve deep thinking and technical knowledge to implement these requirements. As a software architect, I have come across these requirements many times. And I have created unique design solutions for them. And I asked the development team to give special attention during code writing.

At last, your idea should be as unique to yourself as for the customers. The customers do not change existing services unless the new service is comparable and unique to the existing solutions.