Thursday, April 26, 2018

Understand the Customer's Priorities

Determine the real requirements by understanding the customer's priorities. (Posted by Jerry Yoakum)

It is quite possible that the customers would rather have 90% of the system's functionality late if they could just have 10% of it on time. This corollary of software principle, Communicate with Customers / Users, is quite a bit more shocking, but it could very well be the case. Find out!

If you are communicating with your customers, you should be sure you know their priorities. These can easily be recorded in the requirements specification (see Prioritize Requirements), but the real challenge is to understand the customers' interpretation of "essential," "desirable," and "optional." Will they really be happy with a system that satisfies none of the desirable and optional requirements?