Once the decision has been made to undertake the development of a new system or the enhancement to an existing one, then a clear specification of exactly what your organization expects from the project should be drawn up. Comp-U-Max has proven and trusted techniques through the application of gather, specify and manage requirements, liaising closely with all levels of the business that could be impacted by this work. The following is a summary of the procedures we would undertake.

Identify the stakeholders whose input is necessary for the gathering and specification of requirements.

Communicate with these stakeholders to elaborate exactly what their requirements are. (This is normally known as the requirements gathering phase).

Document the requirements. This can take various forms, such a Requirements Matrix, Use Casesor Process Specifications. The method taken would be tailored to suit your organization. Also where appropriate this can be done through the utilization of a CASE tool such as CaseWise.

Analyze the gathered requirements, determine whether the stated requirements are unclear, incomplete, ambiguous or contradictory, and then resolve those issues.

We would also look at other external factors or dependencies that may need to be considered when assessing these requirements. E.g. your corporate culture, limitations of existing computer systems, your own customers' requirements, etc.

We would ensure that the appropriate non-functional requirements are taken in to consideration, (i.e. data quality, security issues).

Where appropriate we can sometimes build a proto-type of certain aspects of the proposed system/enhancement, (e.g. User Interfaces, Database and/or example reports). This approach can be invaluable in giving key stakeholders a good idea of the 'look & feel' of the proposed solution, in turn allowing them to re-assess their inputs to the requirements specification process.

We would produce a formal Requirements Specification which will give comprehensive details of what is expected from this work. This specification will be structured in such a way as to be the basis for any potential next phase. We initiate and run a dynamic review process involving the appropriate stakeholders to validate the Requirements Specification.