IT Management

Reading and Writing Software Specifications

This class will allow the attendee to understand software specifications - or how to specify what a software project is going to produce. Writing more accurate specifications that can be easily understood by the project stakeholders is critical for the IT professional. For the stakeholder - the business person or IT manager reading and understanding these specifications is critical to knowing what they are committing to and what will be delivered at the end of a project. The early specifications for a project set the expectations for it - both ways, it is crucial to ensure that this communication process is well understood from both sides.
Software specifications extend the basic promise of an IT project into a solid expression of what the project is going to deliver. It is a document of expectations and explanations, derived from gaining a high understanding of what the stakeholders want in a new IT system, what is possible with the current IT-state-of-the-art and standards within the organization, and what the project is going to deliver. The criticality of this process and document cannot be underestimated. This course will explain the ways to determine specs, how to build them, and communicate them.

Objective
Attendees will learn:

Origins of specifications
How to identify stakeholders
Gathering information for creating specs
Interviewing techniques
Use Cases and their relationship to specs
Functional specs.
Recording and validating specs
Change control strategies
Test plans, test cases
Validating specs
Reading specs

Duration 1 day

Who Should Attend
Anyone involved in the creation and approval of IT software projects should attend. Since this course is focused on improving the accuracy of information presented and the ways that it is communicated, both the IT professional and their customers would be well served by this course..

Course Format Lecture, group discussion, exercises

Instructor: George Kelly Flanagin or Susan R. Jacobs or Dr. Pamela Kiecker or John N. Pastore Jr.