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3/2/2011 11:00 AM

	piya
1 posts

Gathering and documentation of out of the box requirements

Modified By piya on 6/30/2011 1:37:11 PM)

3/2/2011 6:39 PM

	KJ
243 posts

Re: Gathering and documentation of out of the box requirements

Priyat,

Mmmh, Sharepoint: a piece of software for in-house web and content management stuff (not verbatim). Do you really need requirements? No, because you know what the software can do, right? “We know what we want” and “the software features are well documented” are some of the reasons for not documenting requirements. Let’s extrapolate this to a large ERP where the features are well documented. And lots of these large ERP implementations go belly up. And one of the main reasons for failure is “None or inadequate requirements”.

So, the short answer is, you still need formal requirements, defining WHAT the business needs. For example, lets say you’re a Government Agency and you still publish a booklet of jobs (a monthly gazette) and you also publish the same information on the web. You may need to provide:

High-level processes (eg. defining content, approval, creation, version management and publication).
Use-Cases (defining how the user will interact with the system)
Functional requirements (the system shall … phrases)
1. Non-Functional Requirements (Reliability, the system shall be available 24 x7, except Sunday morning 00:01-04:00 for maintenance)

For non-functional requirements (see FURPS at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FURPS). Also cast you eye over these FURPS+ requirements from IBM (see http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/4706.html).

Warm regards,