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In ReqStudio the requirements collection process is split into five easy steps. Those steps are discussed in detail here.

Areas

We’ll be doing the area identification in the first step. There are many departments and sub-departments, so the area defining is the most important thing because it is going to have more specific objectives. Full look and feel of the main issue can be attained by narrowing down the different areas. The more specific the area is, the simpler it would become to extract requirements.

Let’s first describe the area before narrowing it down it is a unit that has similar process and business data obligations. If you have a business, you will have various departments in it, such as production development, finance, etc. Now let’s take the finance department into consideration. The name indicates it is a single department but it has various operations and can be further categorized into transactions, selling and accounting. Now the area should organize all of the associated processes and information. It seems easy to organize processes and information on a surface level but once you understand software development the particulars are very complicated. Therefore the step one is to find the area.

Business Role

The business role is related to the performance of the task and this is kept by the person in the organization who executes the tasks and manages the process. The position of the person is very important because of its role. Let’s say there are three different roles as finance manager, assistant and accountant in your finance department within your organization and these roles will be handled by three different people. Now you can combine all three individuals into one group. The person with business role will identify these roles and responsibilities. These responsibilities will help to create the security.

Business Data

Now the third step is related to business data after identifying areas and business roles that are inside the areas. As the name shows the step has to do with the data or information. This could be applied to anything that is based on people, things, events locations and market positions related to business roles. Most specifically, this data filter out the necessary need. Suppose you need to create invoice for any individual and you’ll need invoice information which is business data for creating invoice. Then you will make the invoice form based on those business data. This can be highlighted by another example if the customer has to pay the bills and he needs receipt for payment. Then for that again a form or paper needs to be filled which needs business data. This is the data that will be needed in step three. The purpose of the business data is to define the properties of the documents and forms.

Business Processes

When any function or operation on the business data is conducted it becomes business process. The main purpose of business data is to run through various tasks to become business process which will be handling different actions. Let’s understand this one through an example of finance department. In this department new invoices, documentation and other financial systems based on the business model need to be developed. Now the business data will go through different procedure to perform these tasks and this will become business processes.

  Business Rule

Business rule is the last step of gathering business requirements and it is linked with the decisions and condition that will be applied to business data and business process. On a business data there are different operations that we can run over but those processes will be carried out through some business rules. In one of the above scenarios we have discussed the example of invoice hence when you are creating it there will be some business rules that you need to consider. For example you cannot create an invoice with future date. It’s also a business rule that you cannot build an invoice for it if the product is missing in the inventory. These rules make the continuity of the business processes and business data. These are the rules we need to define related to business data and business process in the organization. They go together and the purpose of all business rules is to identify pre-conditions and post-conditions, pre-actions and post-actions that are most commonly taken in the course of business processes.

All these steps work in harmony to get the requirement for the project that needs to be developed.

Looking forward to getting your own project developed? Requirement management approach has evolved over the years and awareness of this is very important for the software development. It will help you understand the importance of such devices as ReqStudio.

The development of software was specified for technical people at the start, because business people felt they could not get any benefit from it. There was another reason for their lack of involvement and it was because they could not comprehend tech. Computer use became very complex for them and they only feed the already developed software into their computers. They didn’t really concern themselves in other matters such as developing a new application and they just used it. They were hesitant to get customized products for their businesses. But with the passage of time the technological advancement been impressive and this sector has been revolutionized to a higher level especially with the involvement of social media. And eventually, they become acquainted with email, Twitter and other stuff that cause them to believe that they can find the customized solution to their needs. In every individual life technology has become a vital part by adding the value to it. So now the collaboration of requirement communication between business and technology became challenging. This has driven shifts in the software industry and then the technological specifications for software development have been made easier for business people as well.

Unified modern language UML was the pioneer in creating a link between business people and the technical environment. This revolutionizes the process of collecting requirements and was used initially as an only mean for consumer to provide requirements. It made the procedure of requirement collection process relatively simpler.

Now that our model fulfils this need as we’ve sequenced the algorithm and can produce the desired result that’s good for both parties so it eased the process. This has made the technical people happier because the understanding of the requirements has just become better as before it was a complicated process. UML made requirement understanding easier but then the end user still had to read them, comprehend them, know and accept them.

The development of software is a highly technical and cost-bearing process, thus separating the user role into two categories would be easier. One is user of industry and the other is user of technical knowledge. Thus it wasn’t an easy job to complete project development by following full SDLC. In the beginning, the process of requirement analysis was very difficult, because if there was anything missing in that phase then what they had to do is try again and dig deeper, exhausting. Awareness of software requirement was also mandatory for the developer due to technical barrier with client. If the analysis phase was not refined then the design developed was not a refined design, either. It was complex to understand and the design was probably made too difficult because of analysis phase.

You can view the example of this approach from seilevel.com, they created this RML requirement language modeling framework with about 20 to 23 diagrams along with 23 different ways to produce the document was presented. Now in their diagram making process they usually concentrate on four things that include humans, data, structures, and artifacts. Along with their business field they gather all these four objects. These business fields also include elements with customer names and other details. These elements now also have three different types of business rules that can be validation rule data type rule, and logical rule. Through this process it is converted in simple natural language. The objects changes states when they move between the processes by moving from step one to step two. All workflows are summarized as processes, and these processes have some rules for performing operations.

From this complete story, it is inferred that business objects, business processes and business rules involve three most critical things that are needed to convert natural language to technical language. After adding all these three things all the job will be finished and you will just have to draw different types of diagrams. Now you can organize all the necessary sort of diagrams and some people to help you handle information about permission and protection.

In this way the full process of requirement modeling language can be documented and it offers a simpler solution. This language is developed for the business people who have no technical knowledge. Through RML requirement modeling language they will be able to explain their needs and demands. System converts it into the language that developer/technical people will understand easily. The full process presents an abstract image of it which can be seen at one point and further information can then be seen narrowing the steps. There are three bigger steps and you are moving into step 1 and that steps split further into five steps. This process of translating is divided into three levels in which level one takes the information from the business and the other two levels convert that information. It display the whole picture at the top and complete details at the bottom in the form of documentation.

This is ReqStudio’s complete story and this is what our platform brings. This platform is designed to help entirely in the development process and allows the user to follow the acceptable development methodology.

So if you are in the middle of making a software development decision then ReqStudio like tools can guide you along the way. Tools like ReqStudio tends to follow the best development practices as they are designed for total traceability of all that happens and full workflow to support the different requirements and then have the artifacts, and also interact with project management software. This tool gives you with everything that is required for any project. By using software like ReqStudio you will be able to develop your project plans and predict the design development testing and implementation, as well as the screen and prototype before starting the project. Not only will the tool show your project’s cost and time estimate, too.

Microsoft Best Practice Requirements shows the best methods for the production of standards and has addressed RML and is being encouraged. With these big analyzes, this development begins and then we broke it into small analyze and it is the best approach for the handling the procedure of requirements.  So, I encourage you to go and get the software training and make the process of requirement handling easier.

If you are a pioneer in the development of software then it is important that you learn the Requirement Management Cycle before beginning of development. This will give you an idea of ways to increase your success rate, since there are only 16 percent chances of software success without the requirement management. The life cycle of software performs certain procedural steps which help to achieve the software development goals. Understanding the life cycle of software is significant, so that we can understand where the requirement management fits.

It is imperative to follow the steps involved in the life cycle of software development as these steps are designed to ensure the successful development of software or any application or a product or may be a device. Complete life cycle is combination of different phases which form different life cycle models. In this article we’ll explain the stages of software life cycle.

• Requirement Gathering

In any form of software development the first step is gathering requirements. Let’s say you need to build a business application. Now you have the requirements distributed into different forms but they aren’t written properly. It means that you have to review every process and every detail of your business for the requirement inventory creation. Once the inventory of requirement is generated in the form of papers this means that we got something. The first step is essentially to gather requirements as many as possible, without the analysis. Gathering of the specifications will give us an abstract outline of the basic project proposal. This procedure is called as zero stage. It leads to cultivate different stages over it. The resultant of stage zero will form the base for the project’s scope and vision.

• Analysis

Requirement analysis plays a key role in the development of successful product. The cause for two in every three failures of any software is the flaw in the analysis process. You have gathered a lot of requirements and now all the requirements need to be screened. You’ll dig deep to filter out the real requirements in analysis phase. Each specification from the inventory will be evaluated one by one and will be classified as being either declined or picked. The classification process will be based on certain predefined roles which will standardize the requirements. You will get every rule correlated with the area, and the rules can be controlled by validations, logical laws, or an internal mechanism caused by choosing something. You have received filtered requirements after the analysis process has been completed. The analysis process defines the project foundation and 37 per cent raise the success rate.

Analysis phase will remove the unrealistic goals that will be difficult to process and will refine the procedure for defining sharp and achievable goals. This process is related to the people who provide the requirements and is the second most important step even before considering any software development.

• Development

We have, until this point, obtained all the specifications related to the development of particular software. Analysis phase contributes to the design phase and the technical individual steps into practice here. The technical person will generate design based on the requirement gathered during the process of analysis. Following the requirements outlined in the analysis process, designer will be able to complete the design step by step. The analysis phase refers to the design phase as a road-map and any mistake in the analysis phase can also cause problems here.

When the design is finished then the project is handed over to the developer and he codes to make the design work. He develops various algorithms depending on the problems needed to handle. He develops the operational schema for the entire application and if this is incorrect then it is due to the inaccuracy of analysis phase. So it is clear that the streamlined requirement analysis can lead to a product that is perfect by increasing project success ration both on budget and on time.

• Testing

After the development system is complete, and therefore it needs to be tested so that we can verify that the requirements have been met as per the analysis phase. Software testing is the application assessment toward user-gathered requirements and system specifications. The documentation or requirement specification produced in the analysis phase plays a benchmark for the verification of developed model via testing.

Throughout all these software development life cycle stages requirement analysis phase is playing a key role. This reflects a light on the importance of the software requirement specifications in the software development and if the requirements are not met then software failure occurs. That’s why it’s so important and the first two phases of SDLC are associated with 37 per cent of software failures.

• Deployment

Thus our product has reached to its last destination after successfully passing through all the steps and that is deployment. In the life cycle of software development this step is linked to the distribution of finished product to the user who requested it to be developed. In case it is consumer software then this stage is referred to the rolling completed software out to consumers. Now the consumer can build user manuals for the delivered software which will explain how to use it and then implement a solution.

For you to understand that this is the procedure that ReqStudio handles, this all discussion has been introduced. The tool is designed to gather all the requirements and then perform analysis. After the analysis it will help to evaluate the estimated cost and time for the product. This is a very simple and effective execution procedure which makes the requirements tangible, understandable and achievable. The main objective of this is to derive refined requirements through it.

So when you use our tool, you’ll find out that all the above steps will be done via ReqStuido.

If you want to start developing a software and you want to learn the best way to do it, then this article will give you insights. Set of specifications for software development plays a key role and so we developed ReqStudio. When it comes to any project requirement collection becomes vital part because it defines the scope of the project.

You must be concerned that why software project fails? Let me explain this in detail by illustrating the facts of the failure first. Development of software projects is very important but only a small ratio of the software projects get completed successfully. Development of successful product is critical as 75% of business and IT executives anticipate their software projects will fail. 33% of projects fail because of a lack of involvement from senior management and only 16% of projects either finish on time or on budget. These numbers give a terrible illustration of the software development failures. Now where is the fault and how to remove it?

The fault is in the process of requirement collection. You always want to be on time and on budget, Right?

But if you start a project today without doing all the right preparation, then there are very less chances of you completing it on time within the budget. The preparation lacks for the development are finding a correct methodology for the requirements, a correct the methodology for development, a suitable testing technique and the deployment procedure. These are the must have before jumping into the development phase. You will only have a 16 percent chance of succeeding in development if you don’t pursue these tactics. So this is the reason that you should use a tool like ReqStudio to increase your success rate.

There are many reasons involved in a software project failure but the most common of them or the main leading causes are given below:

• No End-user Involvement: For software development, the specifications are not generated by the End User or the person who actually does the work. This creates a barrier in requirement understating and demonstration. In many cases the requirements are gathered by technical persons without the deep involvement of the Business User.
• Incomplete Requirements Specifications: It means that someone interviewed the user and was not able to extract exact requirements. Or the user provided the requirements but did not provide all or was not provided in the correct manner.
• Continuous changing requirements: When the users provide the specifications and the product is developed then once the user begins using the software, demands modifications or enhancements. Sometimes during the project continuous changes create misunderstandings.
• Miscalculated Time and Budget Frames: Misunderstanding the requirements leads to miscalculation of the time and budget.

It is estimated that after using software like ReqStudio for the requirement collection of your software, you’re going to improve your chances of success by 35 percent and this is a good improvement. So instead of sticking at 16 percent now, you’ve gotten up to 51 percent. ReqStudio defines the project requirements for you in an understandable manner. ReqStudio also helps you to estimate the cost and time of the project. ReqStudio allows third party tool integration for the different steps of software development life cycle.

There are different people involved in software development as it is assumed to be the complex and expensive process. The development of any software is a connection between the business people and technical People. These two types of people communicate in very different ways and that is the actual problem here. Both people come from different setups hence communication barriers between them create difficulties in the understanding of software requirements. The main purpose of ReqStudio is to help the software development process by making business people and technical people connected through a common way. ReqStudio provides methodology, wizards, diagrams and tools to help both roles for gathering the requirements in an easy way. ReqStudio serve as a bridge between people from different domains. This process carries out the full communication cycle by wizards which leads to you get the specifications step by step. The system is user friendly as it takes all the business information from the user by creating documentation in normal language. This normal language is then converted to diagrams by ReqStudio for the technical person. In this way both can communicate with each other and understand the system well.

Software requirements management is a step within the ALM (Application Development Cycle) or SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). It is the process of:

• • First of all, collecting requirements
  • Analyzing
  • Refining
  • Prioritizing
  • And finally, planning for their delivery

This process sits at the front of the IT development, and it doesn’t matter the methodology used: Waterfall or Agile. The process involves communication between the different team members and stakeholders. Teams are often formed by business product owners and development teams.

The purpose of this process is to ensure alignment of business and IT stakeholders. Therefore, the objective is that software deliverables meet the needs of their customers.What are the key elements to take into account for software requirements management?

Software requirements management must provide at least the following features:

• • • • Traceability, for compliance and change management reasons
      • Cross-collaboration tools, to enable users’ communications using natural language and interact in real time
      • History tracking or version control, to ensure that every action performed by any user is logged and accounted
      • Prioritization capabilities, to ensure business stakeholders and IT teams are aligned in what is most important and urgent to develop dynamically and keeping track on change management
      • Review and approval workflow process, to ensure accountability and alignment
      • Use of diagrams and natural language for requirements definition
      • Reporting, to oversee team results and project advancement
      • Planning, to organize work efficiently
      • And last, profiling of users, not all users have the same profiles. Tools must adapt to the user profile to ease their job.

This applies to large corporations, as much as to small and medium-sized enterprises.

In conclusion, Software Requirements Management is probably the most important step for any software development project. In conclusion, the difference between an effective or an ineffective Software Requirements Management process can have a huge influence on the likelihood of success for any given project and its profitability.

Finally, if you wish to better understand why software requirements management matters, you will probably like our next article!

Software Requirements Management definition was explained in our previous definition article. However, you may wonder where relies the importance of software requirements management.

The Standish Group has analyzed for over 20 years more than 100,000 IT projects. They present a solid statistic about the percentage of projects which do not meet deadlines and/or budget. Chaos Report 2016 indicates that over 50% of projects were not delivered on time or on budget. And over 9% of projects didn’t meet nor deadline, nor budget.

Obviously, there are key practices in the industry that can improve software development performance. According to The Standish Group there are several things which increase dramatically probability to deliver the software project on target. Agile methodologies, keeping projects smaller or highly trained teams…

Nevertheless, companies still find issues in their projects and seek tools to help them. They need:

• Traceability for compliance reasons
• To better manage project dependencies and scope changes
• Early detection of errors with rapid customer feedback on delivered functionality
• To lower the odds of needing to dedicate extra time and money to unscheduled rework
• A strong seamless structure to ensure software development methodology is followed consistently
• Agile teams to align business and IT stakeholders

What happens in an Agile world?

Poor requirements management is a leading cause of project failure. According to Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute , reworking software can increase between 40 and 50% of effort of the IT development. And the origin of software defects happen in 64% of cases during the requirements and design phase:

Software Defects Origin

Other sources confirm the trend. Project Management Institute (PMI) study shows that 32% of project failures are attributed to inaccurate requirements gathering and management. Also The Standish Group identifies that in 35% of the cases, root problem was linked to poor requirements management.

There is little evidence to suggest that things are different when using Agile. The backlog does not normally contain enough information to specify a complete solution. Information such as non-functional requirements, feature descriptions, architectural decisions, etc., can be captured as requirements.

Research has shown it can cost up to 100 times more to correct a defect later than when it’s still in the requirements definition stage. IBM research confirms too the correlation between cost of fixing software defects and the development stage of the project:

Relative cost of fixing software defects according to IBM.

Statistics indicate that companies can:

• Reduce development costs up to 57%
• Improve time to market up to 20%
• Optimize quality cost control by 69%

Have you got an idea but you don’t know how to communicate it to your team members due to lack of clarity? Software projects are typically over-budget or over-schedule owing to this notion of difficulty in communication. The unclear requirements cause continues changes and misunderstandings that could damage any software project. There are multiple old requirement gathering approaches but those are not helpful because those could only be used by technically literate individuals. Gathering requirements through old approaches is a time-consuming procedure with outcomes which are not always acceptable.

To resolve this situation we have worked on a solution that will not only gather requirements but additionally make the process of amassing information smoother for you. The application is ReqStudio proposed for requirement collection process and helps any one to gather the requirements irrespective of the technical skills.

The main goal on which it is built is to make the process of gathering information much faster and clearer, so that everyone could use it easily. The role of ReqStudio is to make the difficult jobs easier and complete the requirement gathering in very less time. This is a cloud application and it can be integrated with Visual Studio or Jira.  It helps to defines requirement easily by working with Waterfall and agile methodologies.

ReqStudio is specifically designed to handle and fully manage requirement gathering that sort out various problems. The process of requirement gathering carried out by ReqStudio includes documenting, analyzing, tracing, prioritizing and agreeing on requirements and then controlling change and communicating to your stakeholders. ReqStudio lead towards the finest development of any application based on the requirement provided. It defines the clear requirements which makes the team productive. It makes the easy collaboration with the client and development team. ReqStudio will be able to help you with any development concept, whether you are a business or a person that requires the requirements to support the basis of its plans. The nature of ReqStudio is kept simple so that anyone can use it.

Requirement Studio provides full traceability of all the change with a rigorous version control. It collects the requirements in five steps that are area identification, roles identification, business data identification, process identification and rules identification. It creates various workflows for the project, and you can accept the workflow or reject it based on your requirements. It also makes you to standardize requirements and reuse them to increase productivity. It allows you to make cost and time estimation with real time where customer can track your progress.

For a technical person understanding the application is simpler as it is user friendly built with the accordance of IT principles. It may have some problems for a non-technical business person and therefore we have developed application guides that will help them understand the flow process. If they are still not sure they will be able to get a two-hour university training session that will allow them to understand the application and they can actually know what to do in each phase.

The application would help your business analyst to work more efficiently, so he will be able to serve all your needs with the given results. This will put a full stop to your fight with the business analyst. So it’s safe to say that ReqStudio is your business partner that will help you achieve your goals and guide you ahead of time to hit your milestone. ReqStudio is a supporting tool which makes you enable to compete even faster with your competitors. Don’t waste your time and let’s begin!

So welcome to ReqStudio.

To continue learning on how to use ReqStudio tools download the complete version of our first eBook and try it free now in www.reqstudio.com.