Software requirements and strategy

I have been on holiday for the last week so it has taken me some while to get around to linking my last blog entries. Still here it is, better late than never.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the role of requirements in software development, and then I wrote about business strategy. What might not be obvious is that: in order to have product requirements you need to have a product strategy, and a product strategy needs to come from corporate strategy. If you lack either you might still go through the motions of developing software but it is unlikely that it will meet market or business needs, and it is unlikely you will have a successful product.

This happens in all industries but is particularly important in software development because software products are usually the realisation of strategy, so:

1. In order to properly and coherently create a software product you need to have a product strategy. You need to know how the product is going to make you money.

2. In order to have a coherent product strategy you need a coherent corporate strategy. Because the product is the implementation of your corporate strategy.

It doesn’t matter much if your local shop lacks a strategy. People still come and buy things, the shelves are restocked and people get paid. But if you have no strategy for your software why would people buy it? What good does it do them?

You might sell a few copies but without further development the product will rot and sales will dry up. Bugs will become apparent, new operating systems will appear, new applications will emerge that you need to interface to and competitors will match your features. Fail to answer these issues and people will stop buying your software. Things change whether you want to or not. And they change much faster in the software industry than in the corner shop industry.

So you need to move your software forward, keep it fresh, release new versions. And that means you need requirements. But you can only create requirements if you know what your company is trying to do. Otherwise you will end up filling you software with a bunch of features which seem like a good idea to someone but don’t add up to a coherent package.

Now as I said before, it is not enough to have corporate strategy, or even a product strategy. You need to have one that can be communicated and understood by everyone. And you need to actually communicate it and keep on communicating it. Part of the way you communicate it is through product features and updates.

So, you need people who’s job it is to turn that strategy into product features. Those are the people who need to have the ongoing dialogue with customers, the market and developers. These people may be called Product Owners, Business Analysts or Product Managers, what ever, someone has to decide what is in the product and the code developers are not the right people.

Now the difficult bit. Too many companies don’t have a strategy, or they have one they cannot, or will not, communicate. They fail to employ the people who will turn that strategy into reality. So it looks like they are busy but the people doing the coding are directionless.

If you want to play the software business game then don’t leave home unless you have:

        1. A strategy you understand
        2. People who can make it a reality

To do anything else means you are heading for a software failure.

Unfortunately very few software development books, courses and methods address these issues but I am convinced these problems lie at the heart of many, maybe most, software development failures.