5 Things to Consider while Gathering Requirements from your Customers

Most of the time, software engineers are primarily interested in understanding requirements only from functionality perspective or, more simply speaking, understanding the stated needs. However, many a times, the delighting experience is missed due to absence of one or more of following 5 software quality characteristics in software coding stage:

• Efficiency: This is also termed as “performance requirements” at the time of requirement analysis stage. This goes unspecified as customers are also not very much knowledgeable about how to specify efficiency requirements. Efficiency requirements include consideration of time and memory usage associated with the requirement.
• Security: Most of the times, software engineers are not very aware of various different security threats and thus, fail to ask appropriate questions in relation with security. These are also termed as “security requirements”. Following are some of the key areas to consider when considering security aspect of the requirement:

– SQL injection
– Input data validation: Takes care of XSS and CSRF attacks
– Authentication & session handling

• Reliability: This goes mostly unconsidered as software engineers are not very clear about what exactly is called as software reliability. Simply speaking, software reliability is associated with exception/error handling aspects of software coding. It is an ability of software code to fail gracefully in case of exception use-case scenarios. Thus, it is very important to identify all the exception and error use case flows associated with each requirements.
• Maintainability: This is not at all emphasized by the client and is considered as “implied need” in the true sense, when outsourcing the software development. The simplest way to achieve high maintainability of the code are following:

– Avoid code duplication
– Follow single responsibility. This results in a highly cohesive code which can be termed as highly reusable.
– Write as many unit tests as possible in order to test your block of code. This increases testability of your code.

• Usability: This is more to do with understandibility of the code. Software engineers may ask specifically on documentation requirements and do the documentation apprporiately if specified by the client.