Gathering requirements
The first step is to gather the requirements to build the software. This can be done in many different ways depending on your organizational culture and environment, detailed as follows:
If you are subject to regulatory requirements (for example, in the aerospace or pharmaceutical business), you need a very formal method
If you are outsourcing development to an external supplier, you need the exact requirements
If development will be handled by an in-house IT department, you might get by with less formal requirements
At the formal end of the spectrum, you need a complete list of all of the requirements that you can test against. If your organization is used to a more informal approach, you might only produce a fairly complete list of use cases or user stories. For a technology replacement project, where you replace a legacy application developed in, for example, Oracle Forms, the requirements might be simply, "it should work like the old system."
Tip
Know the requirements...
