New position myself - need advice on requirements

[Keith Hood <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

I just started on a new contract, and am already
behind. The company where I'm working is developing a
new software system. My predecessor was supposed to
finish a set of Business Requirements and Functional
Requirements before development got fully underway.
For some reason, that person apparently spent a lot of
time working on user-level stuff and left everything
else pretty much untouched. Result being, that person
is gone and I have to try to sweep up.

Development has already started, the BRs are
unfinished, and the FRs have not even been started.
The FRs are supposed to be developed from the Use
Cases (which sounds bassackwards to me), and the UCs
also have not been started.

I've spent the last two days getting briefed on the
nature and scope of the project, and seeing what my
predecessor left on the server. I've begun to realize
my previous experience with requirements may not be a
good guide to this project. My last job, the "FR"
document was actually a kind of mutant hybrid bastard
document that combined both business and functional
requirements under the FR label.

My job here will focus on documentation for future
reconfiguration, maintenance, and modification of the
system. The developers have actually been working with
the IT director for over 6 months now, and everybody
figures they already know so much about what the
outcome should act like, they don't need a design
guide now. One reason is, the major user interfaces
will be based very heavily on systems that have been
in use for several years now. Those parts of the
system will basically just be moved to Java from C++.
The developers are so familiar with the functioning of
the existing systems they refer to them as prototypes
for the one under development.

So, any advice on how to proceed at this point? The IT
director wants to finish the BRs first off, and soon,
because the higher-ups are clamoring for them. I'd be
especially interested in getting advice in how to
shape requirements for reading by high level execs as
opposed to reading by software shop code bashers.

PS: they already have a full-blown coding standards
document. The programmers want to have API
documentation and UML diagrams, but they plan to
generate those themselves after the code is pretty
well finalized.


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