Eliciting and Writing Real World Business Requirements Course

Learn the latest techniques for gathering requirements.  Demonstrations and realistic practice exercises provide you with confidence to improve project outcomes through better requirements elicitation and management.  Gain a thorough understanding of the challenges faced in defining correct requirements, practical approaches for eliciting and documenting requirements, and strategies for managing requirements throughout the project life cycle.  If you participate in defining project scope, capturing requirements, or managing project scope, you can’t’ afford to miss this workshop!

The following supplemental books are used in this class:

More About Software Requirements by Wiegers, ISBN-10 0-7356-2267-1

The Software Requirements Memory Jogger by Gottesdiener, ISBN 1-57681-060-7

This workshop is valuable for all those involved in defining and managing project requirements, especially if you are a Business Customer, Business Analyst, Systems Analyst, Designer, Developer, Team Leader or Project Manager.

Upon completion of this course, the participant will be able to:

> Analyze problems IT customers face

> Implement practical methods for understanding user requirements

> Define system requirements for a project

> Manage changing requirements without derailing timelines

> Elicit user requirements with better interviewing skills

> Gain exposure to business and system modeling approaches

> Practice writing high-quality requirements

Requirements Overview and Project Initiation

The most important question we can ask at the beginning of every project is: “What is the problem we are trying to solve?” - keeping us from jumping into solutions. Requirement foundations are discussed.

Business Case for Requirements Engineering

Definitions, Levels and Types of Requirements

Enterprise Analysis Stakeholder Identification

Defining and Validating Product Scope

Tools and Techniques for Eliciting Requirements

Discover ways to get to detailed requirements using the right tool and technique.  Understand the importance of listening and asking the right questions.

Low-Level Requirements

Interview Best Practices and Other Elicitation Methods

Identifying the Data Requirements

Uncovering Quality Attributes

Analyzing Requirements with Business Modeling

Use Cases: A First Look

Use Cases shift the perspective of requirements development to discussing what the USERS need to accomplish. This is a glance at use cases with a touch of practice.

The Benefits and the Basics

Finding Use Cases

Building a Use Case Model

Deriving Requirements from a Use Case

Documenting and Refining Functional Requirements

The Software Requirements Specification (SRS) is a place to capture refined requirements for final approval.  A sample SRS is reviewed and discussed.

Organizing and Classifying Requirements

Documentation Requirements and Standards

Characteristics of well-written requirements

Common problems with requirements

Validating requirements through reviews and inspections

Defining Non-Functional Requirements

Tracing Requirements

Once the requirements have been refined and documented, the next step is to present them to the stakeholders.

The Baseline and Changes

Documenting Trace Relationships

Benefits and Risks of Tracing

Ongoing Communications