Less than one-third of all software development projects are delivered on time, on budget, or with the required features and functions. Software design requirements have historically been built into phone book-sized documents, which business users cursorily review, sign off on, and forget about. The delta between what the business envisioned and what was actually developed isn’t revealed until the software is coded—which makes changes extremely expensive.

A relatively new and underanalyzed group of software tools have emerged in the past few years that help business users confirm requirements much earlier in the design processes by prototyping applications through requirements definition and visualization. This problem statement explores the world of requirements solutions and attempts to categorize the use cases for the main products.

The full results of our research in this area will be published in the CITO Research Guide to Requirements Definition and Visualization Products. 

Context and Background

Despite the availability of software to help manage requirements for software projects, less than one-third of all projects are delivered on time, on budget, or with the required features and functions, according to research from the Standish Group.

Some 44% of these projects were “challenged,” defined as late, over budget, or having less than the required features and functions. Even worse, almost one-quarter of all projects failed, defined as cancelled prior to completion or delivered and never used. There is a group of software products that can effectively help deliver fully functional software projects on time and on budget, but to date this group has attracted little attention from analysts.

While many other niches are well covered by analysts, a range of extremely helpful requirements definition and visualization products are on the market today to help CIOs and CTOs bring their software projects to successful completion.