Analysis

We believe this a really important part of the software development process and experience shows that proper analysis is crucial to the successful outcome of a project.

We have a collaborative and interactive approach to determining and documenting requirements, working closely with our clients to ensure we understand their business and not just their technical requirements.  The key steps in our analysis process which covers both are:

• Liaise with client to obtain high level overview of business function(s) they wish to implement or improve
• Agree with clients the methods to be used to determine the detail of the requirements
• Document the requirements in a format agreed with the client.  The outputs of this process will depend on the nature and scale of the project but could be expected to include for example: maps of data flows, example inputs/outputs & interface diagrams.
• Submit to the stakeholders for review and then sign off

These requirements documents are then used in the design process with the design documents being cross referenced back to requirements and the register being updated when requirements have been incorporated so that a full ongoing audit trail is maintained throughout the development.

This trail is then continued into functional test plans, which allows a client to audit the inclusion of each of their requirements throughout the project and informs the final acceptance of the system.

Although we have our own process we often find that some of our clients have their own standardised approach to requirements documentation and we are also happy to work to a client's specific requirements if required.

Take a look at a recent blog post on why business systems analysis is so important.