Discussion: This week we discuss the overall process of developing new software and information systems (so this could be implementing COTS or SaaS, not just writing new custom software). Discuss the following using your own words and your own workplace experience. Understand? Don’t just post some “stuff” you found on the Internet or in the textbook. Use your own professional experience to write your replies. Discuss the following:
1) Why is it so important to have firm requirements early in a development project, and what processes have you seen that help manage requirements?
2) Who do you think are the most important people to be involved in a development project, when do they need to be involved, and what can be done to increase project success from a people perspective?
Every organizations need to focus on requirements to grow their business. Basically, company produce products based on customer requiremenst. In simple words, requirement is someone’s ability to provide product or services to customers.
· Management of requirements is very essential factor for any new project or new business. It’s helps with reducing cost for project. For example, if you starting project for developing website for customer you need to make sure what exactly consumer need. Work to fulfil customer demands and you do not have to install extra tools or hire extra employees.
· Planning with help of requirements ensure quality of product, time efficiency as well as consumer satisfaction. For example, some employees try to do more or less against customer requirement that lead to extra time to fix it and redo it as well as you loose confidence of customer with company. Go with exact plan with all requirements help you to build a batter product.
In a project management communication with all the key people related to project is as important as a managing requirement. Project Manager and supervisor are usually the most important people in any project. Sometime, higher management does not involve important employees while making decision regarding project that lead to failure of project sometime. I think communicating and sharing information with all employees relate to project is very important. If manager include and take suggestion from other employees can improve quality of their work as well as the project’s.
References: –
Shemuseva, O. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://steelkiwi.com/blog/requirements-why-it-important/
I would like to discuss my experience developing and implementing a SaaS based CRM application(pega) in my current organization. While business is planning to spin a new CRM application, they had some list of vendors and per the requirements they chose to go with Pega. The next question they had is whether to host the application on premise or cloud. For this, they had multiple discussions with CIO and IT staff evaluating the pros and cons of application hosting on cloud.
In requirements gathering phase Business Owners are involved with application analysts, Application architects to captured requirements. Application architect will determine if a requirement can be met from the application. Requirements are then converted into use cases and Requirement documents. Requirements include both Functional and Non-functional. Requirements play a crucial role as they guide developers on what to code. It will be a huge burden for an organization if requirements change constantly. Hence, Business and IT should spend most of their times to gather requirements.
Apart from Business owners and systems analysts, developers should be involved in development phase. Once the application is developed Quality assurance teams are used to see if the Application is functionally stable i.e. they make sure that all the Requirements gathered are covered by test case. For non-functional requirements security tests, Load test and performance tests are conducted. A Release Manager is also needed for accepting the application into production Environment. Proper requirements will come in handy for success of a project. Also, documentation like Requirements traceability matrix will ensure that each requirement is mapped to tasks and Test scripts.
Reference
· David Bourgeois(2019). Information System for Business and Beyond. Information systems, their use in business, and the larger impact they are having on our world