Requirements Management and Communication (BABOK KA)

With the rise in popularity of agile methods, business analysts and product owners often use the term “agile requirements” to label their work.  We do not care for the term “agile requirements” because it implies that the requirements for an agile project are somehow qualitatively different from those for projects following other life cycles. A developer needs to know the same information to be able to correctly implement the right functionality regardless of the life cycle being used.

So you’ve developed a set of requirements for some portion of your next systems development project. Now what? Experienced project managers and software developers understand the value of translating requirements into rational project plans and robust designs. These steps are necessary whether the next release represents 1 percent or 100 percent of the final product. As shown in Figure 1, requirements serve as the foundation for project plans, designs, code, and tests. In addition to these connections, there is a link between the requirements for the software to be built and other project and transition requirements. Those include data migrations, training design and delivery, business process and organizational changes, infrastructure modifications, and others.

This article covers a trend in the industry that has been yielding great results for companies looking to deliver more successful projects. By cutting down on huge initiatives with outrageous requirements documents that just can't be managed and focusing on implementing features and functionality a piece at a time, companies can be sure to deliver more value to customers more often. 

Every software team talks about project scope and team members often complain about unending scope creep. Unfortunately, the software industry lacks uniform definitions of these terms, and the requirements literature is short on clear guidance regarding how to even represent scope. I confront scope head-on in this series of three articles...

Are the current IT systems meet the requirements of Business users or deliver the services that will bring competitive advantage to the organizations?

IT projects continuing to cost overrun, time overrun or doesn’t meet requirements. Poor communication – particularly between business and technical experts – is a constant problem. – As per Financial Times

Many business analysts focus their full attention on tasks related to specifying, modeling, verifying, and validating requirements. And in doing so, they often forget about a critically important aspect of the BA work:requirements prioritization... Since good prioritizing skills help teams deliver business value faster, it’s a key competency for business analysts to develop. An effective to get better at prioritizing requirements is to follow this 3-step approach during the requirements discovery process.

Business Requirements are central to Software Development Offshoring relationship. Requirements are not hard objects that can be put across as formulas or equations. Irrespective of the artifacts used in requirements communication, requirements remain soft objects subject to various interpretations that may leave many voids for assumptions.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the challenges of requirements communication in Software Development projects.

It’s always the requirements fault! Whenever anything goes wrong with a software development project the requirements tend to be the scapegoat. It is a fact of life as a BA that at some point the requirements you write will be wrongly blamed for a mistake in the product. In reality, any oversight in the product is the responsibility of the entire development team. So what can the BA do to ensure they are not the convenient scapegoat for an issue with the product?

This article discusses a tool for documenting, categorizing, ranking and decomposing various types of requirements (business/user and solution).  The business analyst (BA) can use this tool to capture high-level business and user requirements and then decompose them into solution requirements. In fact, the tool can be used multiple times and results strung together to provide forward and backward traceability of requirements through specification and test cases. 

Large software systems have a few hundred to thousands of requirements. Neither are all requirements equal nor do the implementation teams have resources to implement all the documented requirements. There are several constraints such as limited resources, budgetary constraints, time crunch, feasibility, etc., which brings in the need to prioritize requirements.

 Managers often ask me what return on investment (ROI) they can expect from the money they spend on training, process improvement, and tools for requirements engineering. I’d love to give them a nice, tidy answer—but I can’t. As with so many questions in software, the correct answer is, “It depends.” This article explores some of the factors that influence what ROI an organization can expect from better requirements.

In this article we discuss the benefits of using an appropriate template as the vehicle for delivering requirements. We also cover how a review and approval process tailored to stakeholders can help create the alignment needed to move a project forward.

The 3 Amigos (sometimes referred to as a “Specification Workshop”) is a meeting where the Business Analyst presents requirements and test scenarios (collectively called a “feature”) for review by a member of the development team and a member of the quality assurance team.

Software developers often want to freeze the requirements following some initial requirements work and then proceed with development, unencumbered with those pesky changes. This is the classic waterfall paradigm. It doesn't work well in most situations. It’s far more realistic to define a requirements baseline and then manage changes to that baseline. This article defines the requirements baseline and describes when to create one.

This is the tenth in a series that explains the thinking behind the Volere [1] requirements techniques—previous and future articles explore aspects of applying these techniques in your environment. This article illustrates how the requirements travel all the way through an organisation – and beyond - and how everyone is interested in/affected by them but all for different reasons.