Writing clear requirement specifications are more important now a days than it was previously

Why? In short, it helps you to keep your outsource project development on track and to vision your project success before offshore development team starts working on it. 

I have came across many projects requirement and sometimes I was afraid to even start working on it right away. The project owner were not aware about requirements' complexities and he was demanding project success within shortest span of time. I had to apologize and needed to educate project owner about clear requirement specification.

If you see any other industry then you find they are required to walk through certain rules and regulations otherwise there work become less important. I don't understand why software industry (read most of the IT companies) did forget to walk through best software engineering process and just start working on projects without considering too much focus on it's core requirement. This is biggest reasons why we see 90% of outsource project failure.

In the fast forward technologies advancement, we need to roll over our product ideas in shortest span of time, but still we need to give sufficient time to discuss over requirements otherwise it's probability of failure is high, even if you are following any Agile development process. It also states that requirements must be clear before starting any development.

I have been learning through my experiences and found if we can find right outsource development partner then we can minimize project failure rate, however any good development team can't create actual project out of no requirement or obsure requirements. In our company, Greencode Business Software Private Limited, we discuss project's requirements before starting work on it so that we can deliver project in right span of time frame.

I find that writing clear project requirements specfiication gives you following benefits over obscure requirements;

Make clear statements what need to be done

Think over it for a minute, what happens If you and your offshore development team clearly know what need to be done? You don't need to worry about too much what's going on because you have clearly mentioned in specification document. You have milestones, tasks, release plan, and all related information beforehand. Development team can't make any excuse except delivering project on time. 

Furthermore, clear requirement specifications allow development team to write down very good test plan, automate build process and also able to design project's solution. They can also improve the requirements, in case if they have better workaround for some of stated requirements.

I find having clear requirement makes development team more happy then any other stackholder in project development life cycle.

Allow you to prioritize each requirement separately

Clear requirements help you to identify which requirements have higher priority and which have low priority. In case, if you are slipping project deadline or sometime it happens, that we need to make early release then we can cut some set of low priority requirements. Furthermore, you can hire two different offshore development team to make sure the requirements are fulfilled in parallel, thus increasing project delivering time frame.

Also development team can start working on core high priority requirements and then proceed to low priority requirements, thus making sure the risk of slipping deadline is very low indeed.

Project requirements' complexities are clearly open

Any project owner and development team want to know which requirements are more complex and hard to implement over simple requirements. And that's what the purpose of writing clear requirement specification. You need to make sure the complexities are open in requirement document so that team can understand and come with solution. It also states what falls under development life cycle and which part can be fulfilled by third party library integration. The offshore development team then can concentrate on solving complex requirements first and then move to other requirements.

Help project consultant or development team to make more accurate estimate

Estimating outsource product development cost and time frame is still the buggiest solution in software industry and there is not accurate solution for it. And therefore it becomes very important to have clear requirement specifications so that consultant or offshore development team can understand the project size and complexity, and then can derive estimate based on it.

My experience says that it will reduce your development cost to significant numbers if you have clear requirements. Because, you can send the specification document to different offshore product development team and then they can send back you to proper estimate.

We, at Greencode Business Software, follow 70:30 rule of estimating project requirements. We know 70% of requirements are simple and repeatative to other projects and only 30% of requirements are different. And therefore we charge more to those 30% and charge very less to those 70% of requirements. In total, it helps us to reduce cost estimate for any project development.

Now, you see the benefits of having clearly written requirement specifications. Start making sure to have written requirements, right outsource/offshore development team and then see your project success in shortest span of time.

If you need our consulting and engineering services, then you can connect with me and I will be happy to help you to write clear requirement specifications.