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HOME >> SPECIAL REPORTS

Lost in translation

By Tina Gasperson

October 15, 2008 — (Page 1 of 5)
Requirements and specifications are essential elements of any project that involves software development and testing. But they spring from very different worlds, and every time a customer approaches a developer for an application, those realms are poised to collide.

Requirements “define necessary objectives” on the part of the end user, according to technical essayist Derek Sisson. Requirements let everyone know what the program is supposed to do—critical information for developers and testers. Author Cem Kaner wrote in “Testing Computer Software” that “a requirement is an objective that must be met. Planners cast most requirements in functional terms, leaving design and implementation details to the developers.”

The requirements world is a fluid, somewhat fuzzy space where users know what they want but struggle to express it clearly enough for developers and testers to produce applications that meet the users' needs. Contrast that with the rigidly structured world of specifications, whose inhabitants converse in tech speak, execute tasks in narrowly defined ways and deal in specialized knowledge that outsiders find difficult to grasp.

“Specifications provide formalization and detail around a specific requirement,” observed Bola Rotibi, an analyst with MWD Advisors. But important details can be lost in translation from the customer’s concept to the developer’s spec.

“The customer doesn’t know all the technology required; they just have a need, which they express in the language you and I communicate in,” Rotibi said. Because the customer doesn’t know all the technical aspects of creating an application that meets the need, requirements are often “too loose and vague,” she said. “But there are a lot of conditional Boolean expressions that need to be met should something fail.”

Globalization complicates the process. “Words are imprecise, especially from an engineering perspective,” said Wayne Hom, CTO of Augmentum, a contract software development provider with offices in California and China. “Even among native English speakers, different people can interpret the same set of words in different ways. Expand this to a global scope of international English, and the problems are worse.”

Related Search Term(s): agile development, software development, testing & troubleshooting

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