Understanding Requirements - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 21

4. Project team—Project team comprises of the project mangers, project leaders,
software designers, business analysts, programmers, testers, User Interface (UI)
developers, and Database Administrators (DBAs). These people are also a source
of providing requirements albeit the fact that they may not be able to provide
core functionality unless the product is proposed to be used in software devel-
opment activities. They would however be able to provide ancillary functionality
such as usability, maintainability, safety, security, and reliability and so on.
5. Statutes—Statutes include governmental regulations pertaining not only to
usability of the software but also about possible illegal activities. The intended
software product shall not either commit, aid or abet any sort of criminal
activity. Therefore, the requirements need to include all statutes that need to
be implemented as well as ensure that all prohibited functionality is excluded
from the proposed software product. The business analysts carrying out
requirements analysis ought to be aware of the statutes that mandate inclusion
of functionality as well as the functionality that is prohibited. Some of the
examples of prohibited activities include stealing of personal data, siphoning
away of monies in dormant bank accounts, sending spam emails and so on.
6. Industry standards—These include standards of industry (such as ISO,
CMMI, NASSCOM (National Software and Services Companies of India) or
professional associations (such as IEEE, SPINs, SPMNs) or organizational
standards of either the vendor organization or the client organization. These
standards address various aspects of software engineering methodologies
including processes, guidelines, formats, templates and checklists). A host of
information and best practices are available from such standards and ancillary
functionality can be derived from those standards.
7. Software designers—Software designers can provide ancillary requirements
about the efficiency, fault tolerance, operations ease, installation ease,
usability, structural stability and so on of the end product. Software designers
are also normally part of the project team but are treated separately because
software designers play a key role in the final product. Finally it is the soft-
ware designers that have to shoulder the responsibility for any missing/
defective functionality in the end product of software development.
8. Software programmers—Software programmers are at the end of the chain
for implementing the requirements in the software. However, they are the
people who need to implement all the requirements conveyed to them using
software design documents. However, coding guidelines, UI guidelines, and
any other organizational guidelines would not form part of design documents
and programmers are expected to be knowledgeable of such standards as well
as implement them effectively in every program they code. Software pro-
grammers can specify ancillary functionality aspects pertaining to maintain-
ability, testability, reusability of the code and so on.
9. Software quality assurance team—A Software quality assurance team
includes reviewers, testers, and process specialists. These people can provide
ancillary requirements about testability, and quality perspectives of the pro-
posed software product.