Guide for developing computer engineering college projects — Part 2
Now that we know how our imaginary company Ad Connect’s business works, we need to determine the scope of the system/software that we will be developing for them.
This article is a part of 5 part series. You can read the introduction over here and follow the below series
- Understanding the business and the problem domain
- Performing technical feasibility and scope analysis [Current article]
- Project planning and system designing
- Developing the system using ASP.NET MVC Framework
- Testing & Evaluation of the system for user acceptance
Based on the Business Requirement Document (BRD) received from the business, Business Analyst (BA)from the development team would have to check if there are any queries that the development team has about the requirement. It would be the BA’s responsibility to convert the non technical requirement provided by the business into something that software developers can easily understand and model into a functional software.
The BA may need to take multiple meetings with the stakeholders and resolve the queries. A simple instrument which we generally use in industry is to maintain a Spread Sheet for tracking the queries. The query tracker looks something as follows. You may change the structure depending upon your needs, but this is the minimum that you require.
This instrument can be shared with the business stakeholder via email. It also helps in adding accountability/ownership on business to provide required details in timely manner to cause less impact on the development process.
Download the query tracker spreadsheet : http://bit.ly/2xqFRNl
These queries help in clearly defining scope and behaviour of the system. Once scope is defined you can start start creating the Functional Specification Document (FSD). The format for FSD may differ for various organization, but thee are a few sections which will usually be available in every template. Usually you would find sections like “Scope”, “Screen Specification”, “Validation”, “Business logic” in almost all the document. You can check the functional document we created for Ad Connect to get a better picture.
Please note, this is not a complete document. Samples are provided to give you a better idea of how you should be writing the document.
Download the Functional Specification document: http://bit.ly/2yiUAH2
A functional document would help in analyzing the efforts required for development. Based on the time and resource (including Human resource) availability, an estimation can be prepared to meet the business goals. We would learn about the estimation and project planning in a later post.
It is advisable to share the functional document with the business and get their sign off. Any major changes that are required can be taken up later as a separate project in multiple phases or Change Request (CR). There are various software development methodologies which help in accommodating changes quickly and delivering working piece of software in multiple iterations but to keep this example simple we are following SDLC Waterfall model where development work will start only after the requirements freeze.
Please feel free to share your views and queries in the comment section. We would be happy to help you.
