Introduction

The first step in any kind of software development project should be to determine what the software needs to do. In order to determine that, we need to fully understand the problem. This is the core of what requirements gathering is about.

Think back to the story problems from your early days of math:

If a train leaves station A heading west at 66 miles per hour, and a second train leaves station B at 44 miles per hour, when will they meet?

How would you solve this problem?

You really can’t - not without gathering more information. How far apart are the stations? Did the trains leave the station at the same time? What direction is the second train heading? Are they even on the same track?

The need to thoroughly understand the problem holds true for software development as well. If you begin building a project before you understand what it needs to do, you are setting yourself up for failure. Think back to your early days as a computer science student - did you ever start programming a project without reading the full assignment description? And did you ever find when you did read the last parts of that assignment, the program you had been writing was incompatable with those requirements?

Key Terms

Some key terms to learn in this chapter are:

• Requirements gathering
• Stakeholders
• Formal requirements
• Business requirements
• Functional requirements
• Non-Functional requirements
  • Hardware
  • Software
  • Performance
  • Usability
  • Cultural Sensitivity
  • Availability
  • Reliability
  • Maintainability
  • Extensibility
  • Security
• Feature

Formal Requirements

When gathering requirements for designing a large software system, it is common to find yourself ending up with a lot of potential requirements. It is useful to organize these in some formal fashion, as it makes it far easier to find the right requirements for the right point in the design phase. It also can make it easier to determine if you’ve missed any potentially important requirements.

So what exactly is a requirement? To put it succinctly, a requirement is:

A capability that a product must possess to satisfy a customer need or objective

A requirement can also be thought of as a key component of the software as a business product. This is how your managers, marketers, and your contract likely think of it. To them, a requirement is something that your company has agreed to furnish in the final software product.

For you and your software development team, they serve a slightly different purpose. They help you to define what the goals of your development will be, as well as helping to define the scope of your project. Finally, they provide an objective way to measure the success of a project - either the final software meets the requirement, or it doesn’t.

Business and Functional Requirements

As the previous discussion suggests, requirements can be categorized into business requirements and functional requirements.

Business requirements tend to be high-level, and express the requirement in terms that the customers and business professionals understand. These will typically be the requirements that are bundled into contractual agreements as well.

An example of a business requirement might be “The online sales platform must collect sales tax information and provide reports to the accountants on that sales tax.”

Functional requirements are typically drawn from these business requirements and provide greater detail, ideally enough detail for the developers to implement the full requirement. This often includes details beyond what the customer may think to provide - a part of parsing business requirements is therefore investigating the implications of those requirements.

For example, Kansas has 105 counties, each possessing their own sales tax rates. State law requires that any online sales made by a Kansas company to a customer in Kansas must charge sales tax according to the sales tax rate of the combined rates of the state, county, and city the item is shipped to (this is known as destination sourcing). All tax receipts are remitted (sent) to the State on an annual, quarterly, monthly, or pre-paid basis. ¹

Thus, the functional requirements for this software built for a Kansas company might be:

• The system must maintain a list of sales tax rates for all 105 counties and individual jurisdictions (cities) inside those counties.
• This list of sales tax rates must be updatable
• This list of sales tax rates must be searchable by destination addresses
• Sales tax must be charged by the sales tax rate for the delivery address
• The system must report aggregate sales in each tax jurisdiction for the appropriate remitting period (monthly, quarterly, or annually) to assist accountants in preparing a ST-36 Form (which reports sales in multiple jurisdictions to the State of Kansas).

By following the business requirement to its functional requirements, new business requirements can be suggested as well. Continuing from the example, the Kansas Department of Revenue accepts digital ST-36 submissions. It make sense to integrate the submission process directly into this software, as it will simplify reporting for the company, and avoid needing to purchase separate software to do so, or have accountants spend additional time preparing a ST-36.

Similarily, it might make sense to get the sales tax rates directly from the State of Kansas. The state does provide APIs for doing so at https://www.ksrevenue.org/atrl.html. Thus, the functional requirements could be re-written as:

• The system obtains sales tax rates individual jurisdictions using the Kansas Sales Tax and Use Tax Rate Locator web service.
• Sales tax must be charged by the sales tax rate for the delivery address
• The system must electronically submit ST-36 completed for the appropriate remitting period.
• The system must generate reports of aggregate sales in each tax jurisdiction to assist the company accountants in verifying sales and tax information

Clearly, one further requirement needs to be determined - what specific remitting period is to be used (or if all need to be supported).

Hopefully this example helps you understand the importance of requirements gathering. If this requirement had not been thoroughly investigated, the developers may have assumed the system that only needed to collect sales tax at a single rate. Such a misinformed assumption would have led to much lower estimates of the amount of time and manpower needed to develop the feature, and this underestimate would have been used to develop the contracted completion dates.

When it was discovered that the system built in this way would not met the customer’s needs, changes would have to be made. These changes would be expensive, and who was responsible for paying that extra expense could become a point of contention. Further, it may be very difficult to integrate the idea of destination-based sourcing into the near-complete project, leading to throwing away large portions of progress.

Clearly, requirements gathering is crucial to the success of a software project!

Non-Functional Requirements

There are typically non-functional requirements in every software development project as well. These aren’t captured in the software we are developing, but inform our choices of platform, language, and approach.

Non-functional requirements commonly include:

Hardware

The hardware that will be available for the software to run on. This might be determined by what the customer already has, or they may be intending to purchase new hardware - in which case the software developers may be able to make recommendations.

Software

Other software this software could work with or integrate into. This may include the software already used by the customer (i.e. in our example, the customer’s accounting software might be able to accept sales data directly, instead of requiring accountants to manually transfer it)

Performance

The necessary performance of the software, i.e. how quickly the software will need to process data or how many users it will have. A good example of a performance requirement comes from the Healthcare.gov launch - the developers expected 50,000 to 60,000 thousand simultaneous users, but at launch over 250,000 attempted to sign up - nearly five times the anticipated load.

Usability

Usability - making sure the software is usable by a diverse audience - is unfortunately often an overlooked aspect of software development. Consider the common use of red and green to indicate good and bad status. About 8.5% of all people are red-green colorblind, and cannot distinguish between these two colors! Using secondary indicators (i.e. icons with colored messages) and using different hues of red and green (so there is a perceived shade difference) are simple steps that can be taken to make sure the software communicates effectively to this audience.

Cultural Sensitivity

Cultural sensitivity requirements can take many forms in software development. For example, the user interfaces we design may rely on metaphors that only hold for our culture and appear idiosyncratic for other cultures. The terminology we use in software can also carry cultural implications - the common terms “whitelisting” and “blacklisting” carry undertones of systemic racism, for example, as do “master” and “slave”.

Bias can also creep in other ways as well. For example, most facial recognition software works best for white male faces, and returns more false positives and negatives for people of color. Considering the current makeup of the software development industry, currently 66% White (non-Hispanic) and 20% Asian (Non-Hispanic), leaving only 14% of programmers from other racial and ethnic groups. ¹ So when programmers working on facial recognition software needed quick test subjects, who did they use? Themselves of course, and in doing so, implicitly focused their algorithms on recognizing people who looked like them.

Availablity

Availibilty refers to internet hosted/supported applications, and how often they are allowed to be ‘down’. Consider Amazon.com, which durning the 2020 lockdown was making $10,000 in sales every second while facing its highest loads ever. ² One hour of downtime would cost the retailer 36 million dollars!. On the other hand, designing for limited downtime brings additional technical challenges, like supporting hot swapping in both the infrastructure hardware and the software.

Reliability

Reliability refers to the frequency of error conditions. It may not be a big deal for your text editor to occasionally crash. But for the control code in a pacemaker or the autopilot in a commercial jetliner, error conditions can be life-threatening.

Maintainability

Maintainability refers to the ease with which bugs are fixed and new features are added to a program. There is little software developed today that will not see new releases for the purpose of minor updates and bug fixes, let alone new major versions.

Extensibility

Extensibility also refers to the ease with which new features are added to a program, but the mechanisms by which this is done are different. With maintainability the features are added as part of the core software. With extensibility, these are typically done externally to the core code, through plugins or by accessing an API (application programming interface). This allows the system to be expanded, sometimes by third parties, without needing to replace the existing software installation.

Security

Security refers to how well-protected the program’s function and data are from malicious agents (both human and software-based). Programs that handle sensitive information typically need higher levels of security. The prevalence of Internet connectivity in modern life means that programs are no longer running in an isolated environment - even simple desktop applications need to pay attention to security risks!

Features

Features are another way of describing software, and often get confused with requirements. A feature is a way of describing the software, and tends to be quite high-level. In this sense they are much like a business requirement, but without the focus on the business side of the need.

Usually, a feature is tied to multiple requirements, i.e. a feature might be:

• The site will feature an online gift basket

The business requirements derived from this might be:

• The site offers a gift basket where users can add individual items
• The gift basket will be accessible by the user’s family and friends, and they will be able to purchase items in the basket for the user from it
• A user purchasing gifts in this fashion should be able to bundle multiple purchases for different individuals in a single transaction
• Individual gifts in the transaction should have the option of different delivery dates
• When items are purchased, they are no longer displayed in the gift basket

And the functional requirements would drill into each of those requirements, describing details the designers would need to know to design the software:

• Users can add items to the gift basket by clicking a ‘Add to Gift Basket’ button on the item. This button should display a wrapped gift icon.
• Users can view their gift basket by clicking a similar icon in the right side of the menu
• This icon should also have a number in a pill next to it, indicating the number of items in the basket. This should update dynamically as items are added and removed from the basket.
• While viewing the gift basket, the user can remove items by clicking a button next to the item
• Friends and family can search for a gift basket by phone number or email address.
• In the interests of privacy, the user’s personal information should not be displayed to the searching user
• The friend or family can initiate a gift purchase by clicking a ‘Send this gift’ button next to items in the gift basket.
• This adds the item to the user’s own shopping card, with a visual indicator that it is a gift being sent to the recipient
• The user should be able to specify the date the gift should arrive, within one year of purchase date.
• And so on…

You can see in this example how a simple feature expands in detail as you move from business requirements into functional requirements. You also probably also note that in carrying out this process, you will likely need to return to your customers for clarification of their business processes and specific needs.

Similarly, this process suggests non-functional requirements. To take purchases, for example, we must process credit cards, which implies we’ll need to integrate with a credit card processing service. Additionally, if gifts are able to be sent up to a year after purchase, we’ll need warehousing facilities for storing purchased gifts, and additional software to trigger the shipping process at the appropriate time.

Discovering Requirements

A final challenge in discovering requirements is that your customers may not do a great job of telling them to you. We sometimes describe requirements as falling into one of three categories:

• Conscious
• Unconscious
• Undreamed

The conscious requirements are those your customer is aware of; correspondingly, they’re the easiest to gather because the customer shares them.

In contrast, unconscious requirements are those that are so deeply ingrained in the way the customer thinks and works that it doesn’t even occur to them that someone not involved in their work would not see it. A common example is units of measurement - a nurse or doctor thinks in terms of cc’s (cubic centimeters) as the default unit of volume whereas most of us might use tablespoons, cups, or fluid ounces.

This is why it is important for requirements gatherers to spend significant time with customers, ideally following them through their daily work processes - to see with ‘outside eyes’ the process they engage in. This is very similar to observation methods used in the field of anthropology - a few elective courses in that field will make you a far better requirements gatherer.

Finally, undreamed requirements are those that the user hasn’t even imagined. Most often, this category consists of things we could do because we are writing software and the technologies we can integrate into it, of which the typical user is unaware.

For example, one of the more common software development tasks is to take a process that used paper forms and translate it into software. Must customers will describe their needs as a one-to-one translation of the paper process into a digital one. But there usually are lots of opportunities for making the process more efficient by linking data in ways that isn’t possible for a paper process… sharing these opportunities is a great way to ensure you are making software that improves the lives of your customers!

Requirement Gathering Techniques

There are many techniques used to gather requirements, which vary in their formality and approach.

Formal Stakeholder Methods

Most requirement gathering begins with working with the stakeholders of the software project - those individuals who will be using or impacted by the software. It is important to remember to include all stakeholders - there is a common mistake made where the requirements gathers focus on the requirements identified by a select group of stakeholders, and ignore the others.

In working with these stakeholders, it is common to employ formal methods adopted from the social sciences. Formal methods are systematic in their application and when applied well can provide a clear picture of complex interactions and ideas. These methods include:

• Interviews include a ‘protocol’, a list of questions the interviewer should ask the interviewee. A good interview is conversational, and the interviewer should pursue additional threads that come up in the conversation to identify additional unconscious or undreamed requirements.
• Focus Groups are similar to interviews, but involve a group of stakeholders. These allow you to reach more stakeholders in a shorter period, but can fall prey to consensus thinking (where a handful of stakeholders steer the discussion and therefore requirements found in a certain direction).
• Observations involve observing stakeholders in their usual workflow routine. These are more time-intensive, but can result in a much better understanding of the customer’s needs - especially unconscious and undreamed requirements.
• Document Analysis is systematically reviewing documents related to the process. For example, in converting a paper process to a digital one, you should examine all the forms involved in the paper process.
• Surveys are a good way to get a lot of stakeholder response with a minimum of time. However, determining what to ask in the survey can greatly influence its value. Usually you’ll work from data supplied from other methods, and use surveys to validate what you’ve found or help assign priorities.

Research and Design Approaches

Not all projects involve building a solution to a known problem - sometimes the point is to create something unique and (hopefully) desirable. For this kind of project, approaches borrowed from research and design may be more appropriate. These approaches can also be used to address unknown aspects of a more traditional problem-solving software project. These can include:

• Brainstorming is an activity where the developers throw out as many ideas as they can come up with. During the first stage, no idea is too outlandish. Then in the second step, these ideas are evaluated, winnowed, and combined into a cohesive direction. Brainstorming can help encourage creative and out-of-the-box thinking.
• Prototyping involves rapidly building a part of a system to determine if a particular approach is possible and worth pursuing. When used this way, a prototype is a proof-of-concept, and will not be integrated into the final project. This frees the programmer to use quick-and-dirty approaches (i.e. cowboy coding) to building the prototype.
• Reverse Engineering involves taking apart an existing product in order to create something similar. Consider Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets - they tend to use the same function names and syntax, and they function nearly identically as well, even though they have very different code bases. Not all reverse engineering involves competitor’s products either - another common reverse-engineering need in software is to reverse-engineer a legacy system in order to replace it.

Conflicting Viewpoints

Along with the risk of failing to address the needs of a group of stakeholders, another common challenge in requirements gathering is to understand that different parties in the development process have different ways of looking at the project and the requirements, which can cause issues down the road.

Consider the Tree Swing cartoon, a classic humorous graphical metaphor for communication challenges arising from the different backgrounds of participants in a project:

As a software developer, you need to both learn to recognize the viewpoints of your stakeholders and respond to them appropriately and professionally. These skills are best developed through practice, so be sure to try to see the project from your stakeholder’s perspective!

Summary

Requirements gathering sets the stage for the rest of the waterfall process, and is critical for understanding the needs an scope of the program you will be developing. This process begins with obtaining business requirements from the customer, and should include input from all stakeholders. This information is gathered through formal information-gathering processes borrowed from the social sciences.

These business requirements should be broken down into functional requirements fine-grained enough to give the developers a clear picture of what the software will need to accomplish. Moreover, they need to be comprehensive enough to not leave developers with unanswered questions. For novel functional requirements prototyping and brainstorming can be useful in sussing out possible implementation approaches and their feasibility.

The outcome of this process is a comprehensive document detailing the requirements of the software. It will commonly include sketches of proposed user interfaces and a discussion of how the software will integrate with other systems. It is also common to identify priorities of the various requirements.