Recommended Daily Requirements

Before I learned to read Russell Baker over my oatmeal, my primary morning reading centred on reading up on my recommended daily allowances of niacin, ricin and riboflavin on the side of the Freakies cereal box. (It came with a free Freaky figure in each box, so don’t knock it). Now my recommended daily doses are all about requirements instead of allowances and the process requires a bit more effort than just crunching on some forged together bits of grain.

Yes, today is a whiny day of web development. We have now completed more than one month of daily web development conference calls for RightSite, and the process is, well, maybe, CHARACTER-BUILDING. There’s a good term, or maybe it’s just making me stronger (as long as it’s not killing me). Today was 90 minutes of discussion on the fields included in search results, how to sort search results, and the formatting of a requirements document for the company minisites. (Now to be called “InterSites). None of this is as sexy as hosting a GlamCham party for marketing girls from 5-star hotels.

But we still have another few weeks of this to go. Here’s a quick look at steps in the process and our progress towards these steps:

• Requirements Gathering — should finish this by Friday
• Functional Requirements Documentation — should take the rest of this month
• Technical Requirements Documentatin — follows close on the heels of the Functional Requirements docs
• Development — follows all those steps above
• Testing — is when we get to find out if we screwed up all those other steps

So, if you skip some of the pain and tedium now, you get a bigger dose of terror in that testing stage. With that in mind, I am going back to revising my Functional Requirements Document right now. (Being over the age of 29, I’ll take tedium over terror anytime).

Thanks for tuning in and see you next time here on RightSite.

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