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At a glance

Mastering the Requirements Process

Overview

This course is endorsed by the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA™). It provides material and skill relevant to four Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK™) knowledge areas.

This Masterclass provides you with the insights, techniques and templates to discover exactly what your customers need and want for their systems. There are better ways, engineering ways, to find the requirements. There are ways to know when you have found them all.

This is personally delivered by Suzanne and/or James Robertson, the internationally-recognised requirements specialists who wrote the definitive book on the subject! (“Mastering the Requirements Process”, Addison-Wesley, 1999).

Being a better requirements engineer means understanding that the automated products that you build become part of your users' work no matter what kind of work that is. Being a better requirements engineer is being able to appreciate, accommodate and improve the users' work by delivering products that fit seamlessly into the work.

This program will give you the acclaimed Volere Requirements Process and highlight the checkpoints where you can measure the product and make contractual commitments based on known degrees of certainty. It will show you how to accelerate your process by reusing requirements. It will teach you how to give each requirement a fit criteria, which gives you a measurement to test whether the delivered system meets the original requirements.

“Mastering the Requirements Process” teaches you how to dig out the little things that people know but don't tell you because they forgot, or they think it’s not technologically feasible, or they just didn't think of it.

Intended For

This program has indispensable information for systems managers, project leaders, consultants, business analysts, requirements engineers, systems analysts and planners. This material applies to any stakeholders: users and customers will benefit from learning how to participate in this multi-disciplinary approach.

Prerequisites

There are no specific prerequisites for this program.

Content

The Requirements Process

The requirements process introduces you to a solid strategy for gathering the correct requirements. In this overview session you see how the pieces fit together - from the project blastoff that established the product's purpose and scope, the trawling and prototyping activities that elicit the product's requirements, through the Quality Gateway where requirements are made testable, to the final review of the specification that discovers any missing requirements.

Project Blastoff

This activity lays the foundation for the requirements project. It determines a measurable objective for the product, the precise scope of the work to be studied, and identifies the client, the users and other stakeholders in the project. The blastoff ensures that the project is viable and worthwhile.

Trawling for Requirements

At the core of any requirements process is the ability to get people to tell you what they really want, rather than what they think you might be able to deliver, or what they feel their boss might want. We show you how to use apprenticing, video, use case scenarios, and other strategies to discover exactly what the users need, and want.

Functional Requirements

Functional requirements are those things that the product must do. They are discovered by inspecting the work that the user does, and then determining what part of that work the automated product can do. This proposed interaction between user and product is modelled with use case scenarios. From these, we derive and write the functional requirements.

Non-Functional Requirements

Non-functional requirements are those properties that the product must have. Things such as the desired appearance, the usability, the performance and so on. This section discusses the types of non-functional requirements, and shows you how to use the template, and other methods, to find the qualitative requirements for your product.

Constructing a Specification

This shows you how to correctly write your specifications. We demonstrate ways of ensuring the traceability of your requirements, and how to use the requirements shell to make it easier to write complete requirements. Various ways of organising requirements specifications are also discussed. There is also a review of automated tools available to help manage requirements specifications.

The Quality Gateway

All requirements must pass through the quality gateway before they can be recorded in the Requirements Specification. This activity addresses the problem of requirements creep by rejecting inappropriate, gold-plated, non-viable and incorrect requirements. We also demonstrate how you can attach an unambiguous Fit Criterion to each requirement. This ensures that the solution you implement matches precisely to what the customer originally wanted.

Prototyping and Scenarios

Some requirements are not properly understood until the user has had the opportunity to use the product. Prototyping is a way of discovering requirements by testing mock-up products for the user's work. In this section we discuss the merits of both low and high fidelity prototypes, and how they can be used according to what is needed to demonstrate the work.

Reviewing the Specification

Incompleteness or inconsistencies in the requirements specification cause expensive rework. Here we show you how to test the specification for missing and inconsistent requirements and how to assess the impact of interactions between requirements. This section also discusses how a requirements post mortem can provide you with a way of learning from, and sharing, your requirements experience.

Method Used

This course includes intensive workshops that give you the opportunity to apply the concepts presented. Participants work in teams to discover, specify and evaluate requirements for a significant system.

The workshops provide practical experience in building a requirements specification by:

• Defining the product's purpose
• Discovering the appropriate stakeholders
• Defining the scope of the requirements
• Identifying business events/use cases
• Applying the requirements specification template
• Defining functional requirements
• Using the product's functionality to find the non-functional requirements
• Determining requirements' fit criteria
• Prioritising requirements

As well as extensive course notes, participants receive a copy of James and Suzanne Robertson’s book, “Mastering the Requirements Process”.

Participants also get the chance to receive advice on their own situations and discuss how the ideas from this seminar can be implemented in their own work environment.

Business Analysis Body of Knowledge™

This course provides material and skills relevant to the following International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA™) BABOK™ knowledge areas:

• Requirements Planning and Management
• Requirements Elicitation
• Requirements Analysis and Documentation
• Requirements Communication

For more details on the IIBA™ and the BABOK™ see http://www.theiiba.org