The first post of the new year happens to coincide with some big news in our software development effort. In between enjoying the holidays here in Cameroon (no turkey and egg nog, but some wonderful roasted goat and palm wine), the team found time to finalize the draft Software Requirements Specification (SRS). This document provides a complete description of how the Village Diary software platform should behave from end-to-end. It’s is often thought of as the “master blueprint” for a software project, which is later used as a reference for the design of specific components.

Team members Roland Musi, Mambe Churchill, Bill Zimmerman and Brian Palladino succeeded in hashing-out all the details of the project, asking tough questions and considering a host of “what-if” scenarios, potential gotchas, engineering challenges, functional areas, use cases, mockups and so on. We were all mentally exhausted after the effort, but grateful for having done it.

Normally, a post about a piece of documentation may not be the most exciting thing to read about, but it’s a huge first milestone for our project. With this behind us, we can focus on the “fun” engineering challenges ahead in the implementation phase.

As soon as we’ve revised the draft we’ll call it “version 1” (no relation to the software release number) and post it to the requirements section of the developer wiki.