Software requirements analysis for companies in Germany

What software requirements analysis settles

Requirements analysis settles what a new system must do before anyone builds it. Its result is a document in which each requirement can be traced to a person and checked by a test.

In a smaller company the wishes arrive as emails and meeting notes. Sales wants an export and accounting wants a new field, and nobody has checked whether the wishes contradict each other or what they cost to build. A development team or a vendor that builds from such notes has to guess, and a guess shows up later as a change request.

Five questions I ask about each wish

1. Who needs it, and for which task?
2. Why, and how is the task done today without it?
3. Which test shows that the requirement is met?
4. Which data does it touch, and who may see that data?
5. What happens if it is missing from the first release?

The second question often saves the most work. A wish for “an export of all customers” can turn out to be a list per sales region, which is smaller to build and easier to protect. I describe the habit of asking why in the post Many projects fail on a small scale.

One requirement, written out

The wish from above, taken from the first sentence to a requirement a team can build. Use the fields as a template for your own.

Field	Example
Wish as heard	“Sales needs an export of all customers.”
Reason	Sales plans visits per region each quarter and asks IT for a list every time.
Requirement	A sales employee filters customers by postal code region and downloads the result as a CSV file.
Source	Interview with the head of sales
Acceptance test	A filter for region 60 returns only customers with postal codes from 60000 to 60999, and the file opens in Excel with umlauts intact.
Rights and data	Only employees with the sales role may export. Each export is logged, because the file holds personal data.
Priority	Must have for the first release
Left out	Automatic sending of the list by email, decided by the head of sales

The acceptance test decides when a requirement is done. Without it the developer decides, and the department sees the result only at the end.

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke from Frankfurt. I have worked in IT and media for more than twenty years, among other roles as project manager and web developer at Policen Direkt and as CIO at the Frankfurt-based company Blocksize Capital. As CIO, part of my role was to describe technically complex matters in simple words. I hold a training authorization from IHK Frankfurt for the IT apprenticeships in application development and system integration. Details: Teaching and certifications.