Software Requirements  «Prev  Next»
Lesson 7

Software Planning Conclusion

You have learned quite a bit about planning for software choices. There are many options and strategies involved and you now know about various resources you can go to in order to research the possibilities.
The strategies discussed should also help you to understand the diversity of roles required from the Web development team and the array of challenges facing a successful website's development. Business, creative, and technical roles must be involved in the early planning stages to assure effective representation of needs and resources.
Full team involvement will ensure that the software and hardware selected are appropriate to meet the diverse goals of the site. Major goals include satisfying the business objectives of the client , ensuring site uptime and technical efficiency, and presenting an effective and appealing site that is easily interpreted and navigated by customers.

Lack of user input, incomplete requirements, and changing requirements are the major reasons why so many information technology projects fail to deliver all of their planned functionality on schedule and within budget. Many software developers aren’t comfortable or proficient at gathering requirements from customers. Customers often don’t have the patience to participate in requirements development, or they have the wrong people supply the requirements. Project participants often don’t even agree on what a "requirement" is. The ability to decipher customer requirements is necessary before beginning to write any code.
Software development involves at least as much communication as computing, yet we often emphasize the computing and neglect the communication. One must facilitate that communication and help software practitioners, managers, marketers, and customers apply effective requirements engineering methods. In addition, the requirements analysis must be carried out. The importance of business rules and ways to apply requirements engineering to maintenance projects, package solutions is necessary for the success of a project. Numerous sidebars present stories, all true that illustrate typical requirements-related experiences. Look for the "true stories" and real examples, to draw from your project experiences.

Glossary Terms

This module discussed how to
  1. Identify roles and responsibilities in planning software requirements
  2. Describe software assessment strategies by a third party
  3. Describe software assessment strategies that can be used internally
  4. Identify the differences between deployment and development software
  5. Describe the steps of the software selection decision process
In the next module, you will go into more depth on the topic of software types so that you will be better able to identifying appropriate software applications.