Take time to save time: 4 reasons to list licensing requirements

When you start any licensing project, you can eliminate ambiguity by fully documenting all of the licensing use cases that you and your customers may need. Listing your licensing requirements up front takes time, but it saves far more time later. This article explains why documenting your use cases matters, gives you a checklist of questions to work through, and covers the four practical reasons it pays off.

Why Document Your Licensing Use Cases?

It is tempting to skip this step and create the list as you go. In practice, everything goes more smoothly when you have written out all of the potential use cases for your licensing implementation before development or integration begins.

At the start of any development or integration project, eliminate ambiguity by fully documenting all licensing use cases and mocking up the user interfaces you want. Decide what type of workflow and end user experience you are aiming for. When you have covered all of the potential use cases up front, the result is a simpler, smoother workflow and a better user experience.

What to List: Questions to Work Through

Before getting to the reasons why this helps, start by listing out the answers to questions like these. They are a useful prompt for surfacing requirements you might otherwise miss.

• What are all of the possible ways customers will purchase licenses to your software?
• An online store with a credit card and automated license delivery.
• An offline purchase by another method, with manual license delivery.
• What are all of the possible ways customers should be able to activate, deactivate, and transfer licenses?
• Will there be disconnected users who need to activate, and how readily available is internet access for those users?
• How often should the license be validated with the central licensing server?
• Keep in mind that this decision affects security around license transfers, deactivations, and disconnected users.
• A customer purchases a discounted upgrade from one product build, version, or edition to another, and then tries to install the upgrade on a second computer.
• Should the first computer's license be deactivated automatically?
• Should the user be able to re-activate the first license on a new computer?
• A customer purchases three features from Product A and later wants to add two more features. Can features be split between two computers?
• Should customers with expired software maintenance be able to download minor version updates? Major version updates? For how long after maintenance expires?
• Should customers be able to purchase software maintenance renewals online?
• What are the pricing rules when their maintenance is current versus expired?
• How long after expiration can they renew before paying a reinstatement fee or being required to purchase a new license instead?

This is not an exhaustive list, but it gives you a sense of the breadth of decisions to consider.

4 Reasons It Is Smart to List Requirements

Skipping the use case brainstorming step usually creates more work later. Larger companies with multiple departments often have diverse needs across those departments, and each must be accommodated. Smaller organizations benefit by getting ahead of their market's needs. The exercise of building the list also helps your team work together as a more productive, focused group.

No matter which licensing system you choose, or which resources do the actual design and coding, documenting your use cases ensures that:

1. Your stakeholders can visually see the use cases and provide internal signoff that all necessary requirements have been met.
2. Your developers can properly implement the requirements.
3. Your testing team can test all of the use cases.
4. Your staff can perform final acceptance testing and sign off on project completion.

How SoftwareKey Can Help

Some use cases are obvious, while others can take significant time to think through. You do not have to do it alone.

The SoftwareKey Professional Services team can work with you through a discovery process to make sure all of your use cases have been listed and thought through. We help by asking questions and discussing the advantages and disadvantages of each licensing approach.

We have been providing licensing services for over two decades, and that experience is available to you. The documentation produced during the discovery process is useful for any team working on the licensing project, whether or not that team is us.