Requirements prototyping

There’s currently £250bn spent on business software every year. However, it is estimated that 70% of these projects fail because of poor requirements management. In addition to this, the increasing trend towards outsourcing of software development throws a sharp focus on communications between the business and the development engineers. Unless this communication is flawless, software projects become increasingly risky.

As a result, organisations are turning to requirements management tools to try and reduce this statistic. Sadly, it’s often true that the tool chosen does not meet the expectations placed on it, and the project still flounders.

In broad terms, the reasons for choosing requirements management are:

• to assess and manage the impact of ever changing requirements on a system
• to provide end-to-end traceability of requirements
• to ensure that the system developed delivers the business benefits expected

Verisim delivers all of these, and continues to deliver throughout the lifetime of the project in the form of:

• management of ongoing user requirements churn
• user acceptance testing
• user training

Not only are these detached from the "real system" development cycle, but provide an extra return on the existing investment.

Benefits

What do you get from a Verisim Simulation?

You get a simulation of your proposed system which looks and feels like the real thing. Data is realistic and persistent within a session. There's no 'dummy' data - and we can even include live data feeds if that's what it takes to make your simulation plausible to your users.

Why is a Verisim simulation better than using internal prototyping methods?

If you show a specification document or some screen mockups to six people you'll get six different interpretations of what is being proposed. If you show them a simulation, there will be one unambiguous view.

How is a Verisim Simulation going to cut costs?

Verisim Developer Studio is a toolkit and development environment which has been designed for rapid development of prototyping simulations. We work in an iterative, highly collaborative manner to ensure that we quickly target what you want from your system.
Because the Verisim Developer Studio allows us to turn around change requests in hours rather than weeks, we see huge savings in rework costs. The following statistics were obtained by a recent significantly large project.

We calculated that to make a small functional change to a real system in development, takes an average of 30 person hours. To make the same change in a Verisim simulation takes less than 30 minutes - an enormous saving in cost.