How Strict Should Requirements be?

April 26, 2017
How Strict Should Requirements be? blog image

Requirements are never perfect, and they keep changing. How should developers deal with missing, incomplete and even contradicting requirements? When businesses scope their projects, this question normally stays unanswered.

Client

A client hires an agency (such as Infield Digital) and defines expectations: They write down technical requirements, design specifications, budgets, deadlines. However, there’s one aspect clients rarely mention: “How flexible do we want developers to be?”

There are clients that prefer developers who follow requirements strictly, while other companies prefer developers that are more flexible and self-guided.

If clients expect developers to strictly follow requirements, emerging user experience concerns may not be fixed immediately. Instead, concerns lead to new feature requests that have to be budgeted, approved, and lastly developed. This classical waterfall process is fine for many client-agency-partnerships. This process makes planning easy because the rules are clear: You get what you pay for. No less, no more.

Agency

At the same time, agencies rarely describe the skillset and preferred approach of their development teams: “How flexible can and should our developers be?”

There are agencies with developers who prefer to follow requirements strictly, while others have the skills and mindset to make up for incomplete requirements.

Our Flexible Approach

Before we start development, it’s important for us to sit down with you to learn about your vision for your project and organization. This allows us to pick engineers and analysts that are best for you and your requirements.

We have the skills and mindset to deal with missing, incomplete and even contradicting requirements, and we love consistent customer experiences. So it feels natural to us to connect the missing pieces and exceed expectations.

To see if we’re the right fit for your project and organization, it’s important to start a conversation, contact us.