During customer interaction and product development we usually face two big issues:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s dig deeper into the easiest way of how to eliminate stress and minimize their impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s quite common case when requirements themselves are not well-considered and appear on the level of general idea and a set of high-level application features. So, this kind of text need to be structured and think out to a level when amount of pitfalls like “oh, we haven’t taken into account that we need to implement low-level features which were not included in initial requirements document”<\/em> are minimized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Also during a phase of requirements coordination it\u2019s necessary to carefully and critically track<\/a> all changes towards initial document. In general, proper and recurrent expectation management is a key aspect of working with customer. It allows you to eliminate all misunderstandings and mismatches between your client and developers team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For instance, each call or chat with a customer should end up with a proper summary. It must be reviewed and accepted by all the parties. It\u2019s great when these “sum-ups” are centralized and it\u2019s pretty easy to find any point afterwards. But if such a practice is irregular or non-structured, it could lead to a pretty big headache in case of miscommunication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s why, at Railsware, we invented a tool named “ColorScope” for our projects. Product description may be presented in any text form, whether plain text or bullet point list with any nesting level. Working on requirements could be done in any number of iterations. At least, all yellow areas should be eliminated (all questionable points should be made clear).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thereby, PRD (product requirements document) at any moment appears as a clear profile of current state of requirements which eliminate any discrepancies. And final state of “ColorScope” is a specific layer between customer requests (source) and what was taken into development and implemented (target). Even more, this approach allows to change the “source” and backward change the “target”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The most convenient tool to use in this case is Google Docs. It allows us to collaborate in real-time, seeing all the changes right away. Finally, Google Docs allows you to store and share all documents in one single place using folders, My Drive and sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because:<\/p>\n\n\n\nColorScope approach<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The essence of this approach is quite simple: during requirements analysis we use “painting out” of already worked out areas within one of five colors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It has revision history to track all the changes made earlier, it\u2019s always available for anyone who has access to it. In addition, there are few nice features like chat straight in the doc and internal comments (which highlight commented text in yellow, by the way).<\/p>\n\n\n\nHere is an example<\/h3>\n\n\n\n