by Narada Rathnasooriya 4:48 AM 0 comments

3.07. Strive to fully understand the specifications for software on which they work.

This is one of the closures that a software engineer should really consider about. Because unless the developer doesn’t know the specifications for the software properly there is no guarantee of a good out come. Before developing a software, a developer should always have good understanding of the specifications. This scenario can be interpreted in many ways.

For an example if you are a Freelance developer and if you are undertaking a software project from a client, unless you understand the specifications that he needs you can’t really agree upon on the project. If the developer agrees upon on the project without understanding the specifications, at some point of the development life-cycle of the project the developer realizes that he or she has undertaken a task that is unachievable. When the developer realizes this it may be too late.

In another scenario a developer might be working in a software company. He might be given a software to be developed that has undertaken by the company. If he starts to develop the software straight away without getting a fully understanding of the specifications the ultimate product may have functionality that is not expected.

In the project that we did for the Rotaract Club of Faculty of Science, University of Colombo, we took a reasonable time to get familiar with the specifications that they wanted and took out the ones that seemed unviable during the time period and told them about the issues with the specifications. One such incident was the payment gateway that needed for the site. After doing some research we found out that a payment gateway costs way more than what they can spend on it. We mentioned that to them and we had to remove it from the specifications of the web site.

Other than that we didn’t find any specification that was unfeasible. We read the specifications thoroughly to get the complete understanding of it so we won’t get stuck in the middle of the development process. The development becomes pretty easy when you get the understanding of the specifications. Earlier in some scenarios I have faced in to some set backs due to not reading the specifications properly. This closure helps both the developer and the client to get a better product and it also helps the life of the developer easier.