Upon receiving the go-ahead to begin work on a project, the first thing we do is understand what it is that we are to build. We call this the Requirements Gathering phase and this is carried out by a business analyst (as opposed to a programmer). As we have done this many times before, we have checklists that streamline the process. Each project is different but will almost certainly include several of the following activities:

• Interview executives and other stakeholders
• Facilitate workshops with stakeholders
• List prioritised business requirements
• Determine technical constraints
• Understand existing and future business processes

• Write use cases
• Create wire-frame screen layouts
• Build non-functional prototypes
• Compile a functional specification
• Model data requirements
• Analyse the quality of existing data

After this we will have a good idea of the scope of what we are building and can move on to the technical design.