How much do you value the success of your mobile app development project?
Did you know that up to 50% of project rework is due to ineffective requirements gathering? That is why we built our bespoke requirement gathering tool to streamline and save costs on mobile app development in the short and long term.
Project failure is not acceptable and amounts to higher investments and poorer results.
Instead, let’s help you understand how requirements-gathering boosts mobile development.
Furthermore, let’s show you 10 easy-to-follow steps to gather and document mobile requirements.
Mobile app requirements document the business logic, technical specifications, and development guidelines for mobile app developers to design the application of your business dreams.
It includes the key app’s features, app user personas, and business goals to ensure that multiple team members are on the same page before the software development process commences.
At Requiment, we often see that requirements-gathering for mobile or other applications has benefits, including:
A technical design document or functional specification could relate to multiple types of mobile applications.
Here are some examples of apps for which you should gather requirements:
Also, you have four primary mobile application types, such as:
Hire ReactJS developers from our parent company, or hire dedicated developers for the right app type.
Requiment is a product designed by Pulsion Technologies, dedicated to helping you gather the ultimate requirements for your mobile app development project.
Our demo videos show you some of our features, and you can easily sign up for a free trial or book a demo to see our tool in action.
Our about us page shares the story of how we help businesses gather requirements, even including tools like:
We enable users and fellow mobile app developers to understand and prepare everything necessary to develop a highly competitive application.
So, let’s start by sharing the basics and requirements gathering process for multiple team members to hop aboard the development train.
Mobile apps have different requirement types to collect, including:
A functional specification document will outline the product’s features and how users interact with the app.
On the other hand, non-functional requirements include the technical specification for the app’s quality attributes.
For example, a functional requirement refers to the sign-up button users click on before using your services.
However, non-functional requirements refer to how fast the system responds to the user clicking on that button and how the system protects their data while clicking the button.
Next, let’s show you the steps to gather requirements for a mobile application to ensure you meet the business requirements and key features necessary to develop a profitable product.
Some steps will involve sub-steps to help you gather the right information and requirements for documents.
Mobile development requirements-gathering starts with a business idea. The first information you need is the idea or purpose of the mobile app.
What purpose will it serve? Does it offer a solution to a potential problem?
You need to identify a problem the app will solve to recognise the idea or purpose behind it.
An app idea is fruitless without understanding business needs, business goals, and business rules.
This step encourages you to gather business requirements to understand how the enterprise aligns with the idea from the first step.
Gathering business requirements to document involves these steps:
So, what requirements-gathering elicitation techniques could you use to gather stakeholder requirements for the business requirements document?
Elicitation techniques work for any requirements-gathering type.
Here are some popular and successful techniques to use:
Conduct a market or competitor analysis to truly understand the user’s perspective and design the appropriate user personas.
It also helps your team gather more user requirements for the development company.
The following steps explain the process of gathering user and competitor requirements:
The SWOT analysis in a table will help you see what the new product needs to do to compete better with the top market competitors.
Rank each competitor from 1-10 on each key element.
Then, rank what your mobile app aims to have in the requirements, looking for opportunities to improve the numbers.
The next major step in mobile app requirements-gathering is to design user personas and scenarios to guide the requirements.
A user persona fictionalises the target users for the mobile app.
It should describe the ideal person who uses the app, with some flexible aspects for alternate users.
The ultimate user person could include the following details about target users:
How would you transform user personas into scenarios?
Create a persona scenario or storyboard by focusing on the goals, how their typical behaviours affect them, and how the persona’s background motivates them to respond differently.
Write the scenario as a short paragraph for starters, as you’ll design user stories later. Meanwhile, identifying stakeholders for requirements gathering means creating personas.
Your user and business requirements are shaped through the initial steps of app requirements gathering.
You still need to document them, but you’ll do that soon enough.
Meanwhile, start prioritising the functional and non-functional requirements for the technical details, which also design use cases.
First, determine which functional app requirements the project needs.
Here are some examples of functional mobile requirements:
Secondly, determine the non-functional requirements necessary to run your app.
Here are some examples of non-functional requirements in mobile development:
Next, you’ll prioritise the non-functional requirements (NFRs) and functional requirements for an app.
Priorities determine the tech stack and importance of each function.
The MoSCow prioritisation technique helps with any requirements prioritisation before documenting the requirements.
The technique requires you to put every technical requirement into one of four categories:
Include requirements for user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) with your functional and non-functional requirements.
It helps to have these requirements in place before designing use cases and documenting a key user experience and user flow requirement for app development.
Requirements prioritisation simplifies decision-making for your app.
A mobile system requirements document won’t be complete unless you add use cases and stories.
Design them before documenting the specifications for the development company or team.
Use stories and cases to add visual representation to your documents for mobile app development documentation.
A use case diagram lets everyone at the development company visualise an overview of how users will interact with the app.
It’s an overview that includes actors, how actors interact with the app, and the sequence of interactions actors will deploy.
Here’s a simple example of a use-case diagram that shows an overview of how actors interact with functional features while non-functional features interact with the app from the back-end stack:
A story evolves the user persona you wrote earlier. Creating user stories lets the development company design an app that meets acceptance criteria.
Transforming a user persona into a story means you must follow the INVEST acronym to guide the criteria.
In other words, every user story must meet the following factors:
Here’s a criteria example that depicts a good user story:
The criteria can go on but keep it short, as you’ll use different user stories, including one where the user checks an item out of their cart and makes payment.
Delivering a proper app requirements document means you need to know how to write a mobile app requirements document.
Our requirements-gathering template checklist can help you design a mobile app requirements template, as it works for web and app-based documentation.
We guide you to know how to write a software requirements document (SRD), but let’s show you alternative steps.
Alternatively, follow our how-to write a mobile app requirements document steps to get the development process moving.
Mobile application development relies on the requirements document to design proper flow or the best app features and hit the right target audience.
Every app requirements document should include an idea statement that lets every stakeholder and software developer understand the document before diving into the details.
Start your app requirements document with a simple single-sentence statement that aligns with the app’s idea.
A detailed description of development plans in the requirements document is instrumental to completing the documentation.
A successful mobile app requirements document includes more than the details of an application and its functions for the development team.
A mobile application requirements document should include a detailed description of functional and technical requirements and the app’s functionality to properly capture and represent the project’s scope.
The development team requires a simple navigation sequence they can follow during software development.
The mobile app requirements document outlines the sequence in which the software development process flows.
Add the details from step 7b in a sequence that every developer can easily grasp.
Add your user stories from a user’s perspective and the use case overviews you designed to the app requirements document to help stakeholders and the development team understand every aspect of the app requirements document.
Successful software development means knowing the intended users.
The development team, stakeholders, and the client will appreciate a cost-benefit analysis to ensure cost optimisation throughout the software development process.
You’ll find guidelines for cost optimisation in your business objectives or budget.
Business analysts also insist on adding a cost-benefit analysis to an app requirements document to meet the business needs and have a greater chance of success against competing apps.
Ensure another key element is in your document before delivering the mobile app requirements document to a project manager, stakeholder, developer, or operating environment.
Add communication methods for a collaborative process. Collaboration relies on dependable communication.
Alternatively, use a mobile app requirements document template to capture the requirements for app development.
A mobile app development requirements document template speeds up the process for non-business analysts or requirements analysts.
Helpful related post on business analyst requirements gathering how-to guide.
Our product requirements document template for app development will help you document everything.
The requirements document focuses on product or system requirements to develop an app.
It’s a basic app requirements document template that app stores and development teams can follow.
Prototyping and wireframing let you design the user flow of user interfaces and basic app functions.
It also lets you test and validate layouts and transitions between app pages.
Here are the steps to wireframe your requirements for an app, which you will then validate in the next step:
Validation is a quality control process you use before launching the final product based on your requirements.
The prototype app collects feedback from stakeholders, and you can invite stakeholders to verify that the app meets the documented requirements. Use the feedback for the final step.
The benefits of collaborative requirements gathering share insights about feedback and collaboration.
Agile methodology in requirements-gathering means you’ll always adapt the requirements document as per the feedback from stakeholders, testing, and initial product releases.
Agile methodology focuses on user experience and constant testing and validation to further improve your application.
Gathering the right requirements for a mobile development requirements document follows ten steps, some containing sub-steps with easy-to-follow guidelines.
Our Requiment product helps you through these steps, so don’t forget to sign up for the free trial.
However, our easy-to-access document template for mobile requirements-gathering also sets your project up for success.
Follow the steps in this guide, or check out our complete guide to requirements-gathering in 2024 to ensure a smooth, successful project.
An Android app requirements document will need the following additional technical details:
An iOS app requirements document will need the following additional technical specifications:
A native iOS app requires programming languages like Swift or Objective-C, whereas a native Android app requires programming languages like Kotlin or Java.
The tech stacks in native apps depend on the operating system’s environment, which means adding more details to product requirements documents.
The minimum requirements necessary for a web app include a user interface, database, security features, and backend infrastructure.
Testing and prototyping are instrumental to web app development projects and requirements gathering to ensure your product meets user needs.
Our product Requiment requirements gathering software, guides you through prepared questions to determine a full and detailed requirement specification and project scope based on outcomes. This application acts as a virtual business analyst, guiding users through the requirements process, whilst providing insight and recommendations to the user based on the type of application being designed as well as trends from other users. Ultimately, our mission with Requiment is to make the process of software requirements capture more accurate, agile and efficient leading to more successful projects.
