I just read an interesting article from Bob Larivee of AIIM (‘Requirements, we don’t need any requirements’ ) about the importance of requirements. He writes ‘Know where you want to go and how you want to work then address the technology and you will achieve higher levels of success.’

I find this a very good summary of the importance of requirements. We often get project requests in which a few written lines explain the needs of the customer. And each time I am wondering ‘what do I miss here and what should I ask the customer’. The biggest problem is that often the customer himself doesn’t know exactly what he needs. And if he does know, it is clear in his mind, but this clearness has to be communicated to us, the knowledge has to be transferred. (more…)

In our series ‘inside perspective’, we describe the development process of Bridge in launching medium sized web projects. In this article our developer Aneesh describes his experience with Rentautobus.

The project Rentautobus is one of the best projects I have done. It’s a complex web application, built to automate the process of renting buses for trips. A team of two developers (including me), 1 analyst and 1 project manager were doing this project.

As in all complicated projects, we took sufficient time to analyze the requirements. The specifications document we received from the customer was large, but had a lot of questions and risks in it, which we tried to eliminate. We found that some links were missing in the documents provided by the client. At this point we decided to make a final specification document that connects all the broken links. Also we made a flow chart showing the basic flow of the site. This specification and flow chart were sent to the client and got it approved. These documents were the base of development. The analysis and documentation phase took some time but we knew that it would pay off later. (more…)