Requirements Tools that Empower Business Analysts

Industry experts agree -- the success of any software development project depends directly on the definition of complete, high-quality, accurate requirements. Today's business analyst (BA) takes a lead role in defining those requirements. BAs are responsible for eliciting, analyzing, communicating, and validating requirements for a huge variety of business processes and information systems.

Since the activities of a BA are so critical to a timely, cost-effective, successful software project, it is important to equip the modern BA with a toolset that supports and accelerates all requirements definition activities, as well as provides the BA with practical guidance and resources to support this rapidly evolving role.

This toolset, known as a Business Analyst Workbench, allows analysts to do the following:

• Gather and record stakeholder needs from a variety of sources
• Interpret and analyze this information to produce a set of solution requirements
• Collaborate with stakeholders to validate the requirements
• Communicate the agreed-upon requirements to those who need to design, build, and test the solution

A Business Analyst Workbench can dramatically increase the accuracy and efficiency of both requirements definition and test definition. But what should you look for when evaluating a potential workbench?

A full-featured Business Analyst Workbench should satisfy four main criteria:

• Support for multiple requirements approaches
• Support for all phases of the requirements definition lifecycle
• Intelligent integration with other application lifecycle management (ALM) tools
• Inherent change management of requirements

Author: Tony Higgins