The battle between requirements and product development
Importance of analyzing your business requirements. A step-by-step guide to business requirement analysis and documentation.
Abusiness cant be setup, unless you know how and what you're going to do with it. Business requirement analysis is nothing but the overall concept of what the business is about, why it is being founded, what it’s going to achieve, and more. You should perform an entire business requirement analysis, and document the same to come up with a good software product.
Business requirement analysis will answer many questions, like — Why you’re building the software product? What are the users’ expectations from you? How will you get benefited from the product?
What happens when you skip requirement analysis?
To be honest, your business will most probably turn into a disaster.
If you fail to gather relevant business requirements or assume some parameters for yourselves, you might end up creating a poor software product. This will result in poor market outcome, take up extra resources, and on the whole will end up inflating the cost and timeline of your project.
Requirement analysis will help you streamline your product improvement ideas into a more logical action plan. It will help you understand the end-users, when and how the product must be released, and process accordingly. It will act as a point of reference throughout your entire business cycle and oversee its success.
Are there any guidelines for requirement gathering?
Yes, there are a few steps and simple process guidelines when it comes to requirement analysis. They are-
Step 1 : Identify customers/shareholders/sponsors
Your business is going to focused on certain end users. Therefore, it’s highly essential for you to understand their requirements. When your start-up grows, you will also have to work with sponsors and shareholders. This is where you need to study about your possible shareholders and sponsors.
You can start by compiling an exhaustive list of your potential customers, shareholders, and sponsors.This will give you numerous ideas about your product and what it must do, to be liked by all.
Only when you understand the business requirements, you can decide on the limits and extent of your business. So take as much time as you want because this is the crucial step in planning your business.
Step 2 : Classify their requirements
With so many requirements on your records, you might now be thinking about how your business would meet all those needs. But, that’s a practically impossible task! You can only build your business to meet the genuine requirements of the major portion of users. Others might only set illusional values.
It makes better sense to group the requirements under two categories — Functional Requirements and Non-Functional Requirements.
Functional requirements — It describes the behavior and other functional information of your product, as expected by your customers/ users/ shareholders. How your product must work? How it should look? What it must provide? and more.
Non-Functional requirements — It describes all other customer requirements in terms of human values. People don’t simply buy a product; many stop and decide on the values, like usability, scalability, reliability, support, extensibility, and more.
You can further classify the user requirements, depending on various factors, like specific to the end-users practical requirements, operational requirements of the business, needs that identify with the successful project completion, and more.
Step 3 : Analyze the requirements
Now that you have the entire requirements classified under different sections, you can start a detailed research about each requirement fields. This analysis is required to circle on the possible, practical user requirements and skip the impossible ones.
Determine whether the list of requirements is pretty straightforward — Do you find any ambiguity in your report? Is there any major contradictory requirement clash? Is it possible to implement the requirements within your timeline and economy?
Make a list of conflicts in your requirement analysis. For instance, if you’re building an application that provides online medical assistance; some users might like sharing their personal information, while others would want anonymity. You will have to classify such conflicts because they play a major part in deciding the functionality of your product.
Step 4 : Record the findings
Once you know the entire requirements of your product, you will have to document your findings. This will act as the ultimate guide to why your software product is being built in the first place.
This rule book will tell you the dos and don’ts in building a user specific product for your business.
Classify all your findings under relevant sections in the document. You can follow this guideline for classification
Now, you have made your own set of case studies, user analysis, possible shareholders views, and more. This will tell you how and what your business must work towards.
Thanks for reading! To learn more about building your own start-up business check out our e-book “The Definitive Guide To Building Your Own Innovative Software Product”
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