I don’t want to waste all of that money and time on useless paper. Just give the dev team a couple wireframes or a screenshot mockups and and a few general ideas of what should happen. That should be enough to build the product. But, what about the dialogs that should accompany the application. I am talking about the lower layer dialogs, such as Error dialogs, Add User dialogs, etc. Oh the developer will figure it out eventually.
But this is exactly how to just about guarantee software project failure right from the beginning, especially if it is a complex software system like most medical products are characterized by today.
The reason is that there is no clear indication of effort for the project. Do you need one developer? Do you need three? Do you need the Fifth Regiment? But, you can only afford two based on your present budget for the project. And how do you know whether you are closing in on finishing.
There is nothing more accurate as counting things. You have 80 requirements. Each developer can accomplish 4 average requirements per week. You have 2 developers. 2 X 4 = 8 requirements can be done a week based on your present staff. 80 requirements will take you 10 weeks or 2 1/2 months to develop if all goes according to plan.
And by the end of the first month you can check off what you have done and see if you are on track to finish in time. You can adjust your team or your requirements in time to make sure you will make your deadline.
Using ambiguous screens without individual requirements you have nothing to count. Are there 80, 100, 1000 requirements lurking in there? Are you in trouble once you start going down the road without knowing how much gas you need?
Understanding your effort based on the number of requirements you have initially is essential to ensuring that your project is not set up for failure right from the beginning. Isn’t worth adding just one extra person to your team to write the requirements ahead of time to ensure you are not going to crash and burn by spending all of your capital and have no chance of delivering anything to sell.
