My Awesome Technical Creations!!!

It's been quite a while since my last blog.So I decided to write another one just to save my blog writing talent.

The topic that I selected for this blog " Mobile Functional Specifications", sounds like a very corporate oriented, very boring topic, but did you know it forms the heart of any Mobile development project. There are thousands of books on iPhone development out there, out of which very few discuss this topic in detail. I like to question these books right away. Why? Why can't you guys specify about the functional aspects and requirements, but rather jump to the coding aspect which is only of relevance when a person just wants to learn coding with no BS involved.
Functional Specifications(FS) are no BS, for starters, these comprise of the requirements and the functioning(obvious) of the modules associated with any app. You can be a hardcore developer or designer, but without requirements properly laid out, you will keep coding and designing, till 2012(end of the world).
The best way to avoid lot of coding errors and looping in programming, is developing a strategy(requirement analysis) followed by code layout/technical flow explained, which helps us developers understand how to go about the project. It is like a torch that leads us through the dark path when we are roughly aware what the project goal is, but not about how to go about this goal.

Functional Specifications are usually dealt with by business analysts in any corporate environment, so us developers, disregard the fact that it is our responsibility to go through it as they do.
For instance, I was among the people who did the same. I used to disregard the specifications and scan through the well defined diagrams in FS and start developing asap, resulting in an extremely erroneous output, which took me ages to fix. In my recent project, we did not have any business analysts. At first I was apprehensive about it, I wondered how would I go about this project without one? how would I do the development like this? There were some FS's which were very roughly laid out and not that obvious.
I had given up hope, I thought time for another big messy project and the stresses that I would have to deal with because of module coding errors. But to my surprise, I read articales on gizmodo, consulted some nice Business analysts, got the templates and design from them and was able to lay out the structure and fill it in myself. A few drafts were formulated, but eventually I was able to nail it and guess what? I had awesome understanding and knowledge of the project requirements at hand and how to go about them. sometimes I think I would have preformed even better in the previous projects if no Business analysts were involved. might take time to do it without them, but atleast it would save months of coding errors(which is equivalent to spending time in hiring business analysts/ their involvement)
No I am not trying to take away the jobs from Business Analysts, but I am trying to mention that maybe in the Mobile environment we will be better off doing things by ourselves just to get perfect practical knowledge of the project requirements at hand( best experience in life comes from doing things yourself)
Most general Functional Design/Analytical or Technical Specifications consist of the following attributes:
Introduction
Module details(consisting of the following):
1. Requirements
2. Requirements Analysis
3. Functional Diagrams(Mock-up diagram/ state flow diagram etc.)
4. Feature Priority
5. Possible alterations/ additions for future( which basically help to lay out appropriate design during development to incorporate the possibility for addition of new features, thus helping to avoid rewriting code logic again and again.
6. Technical Overall flow( with possible diagrams)

Thus these self explanatory steps form the basic milestones in any Mobile development projects and help in improving the quality and style of any coding practice and most importantly it SAVES a lot of time and we all know time is money!

Lesson to learn: Never ignore FS, as it can really help you with ANY mobile project at hand.

Cheers!
Vishwan :)