Think about access to the data

This is another key aspect that must be carefully thought out and explicitly stated in the requirements: How are you are going to get the dataset? Maybe you already have access to the company database, or maybe you need to get permission to access it. Another possibility is that you will ask the people in charge (database administrators or data engineers) to provide you with the data you need; in that case, you need to be really clear in your communication about what you actually need, so make sure you understand the data's particularities.

Here are some of the considerations to keep in mind when asking for a dataset:

• The format in which you expect the dataset
• If given in a table format, the type of each of the dataset columns
• How the missing values will be encoded
• In which encoding the files will be provided
• In the case of historical data, how much time will be needed