I offer custom software development services for situations in which existing (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) products fail to satisfy a customer's business requirements.

In most situations, a COTS solution will be more cost-effective and offer a variety of post-implementation support that will not exist for custom software. However, some customers may be forced to make compromises to use a COTS solution in a unique business environment. In such a situation, custom software may be more appealing since it will function exactly as designed, based upon the customer's specific business requirements.

I will try to match customer requirements with COTS systems as often as possible, but may recommend custom solutions when substantial benefit may be realized.

If a specific custom software development project is desired, please contact us. To help determine whether custom software is really necessary, please consider authoring a list of your business requirements ahead of time so that I can more accurately offer time and cost estimates. If you are new to software requirements specification, please browse the Wikipedia explanations linked at the end of this page.

Specifying requirements for a complex business system is very time-consuming and may even seem overwhelming, but it is the most important step in determining your actual software needs and being able to convey this information to the developers who will spend tens, hundreds, or thousands of hours in the construction of such a system. The more complete the requirements are at that the beginning of development, the faster the system can be built, tested, and implemented.

A new trend is to take an agile approach to software development, since many businesses have little idea of what they actually need. This is not an efficient way to start a development project. Each time specifications change mid-stream in the development process, many dependent pieces of the system may need to be changed to accommodate those changes. This not only adds to the project scope, but adds to the overall cost of the project. Please consider this before deciding that gathering requirements is not worth the time or effort, since it is the best way to save both time and effort, and ultimately cost.


Software requirements specification and gathering reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Requirements_Specification
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requirements_analysis