This industry-endorsed 3-day intensive, activity-based course provides the structure and techniques necessary for the “Requirements Producer” to competently elicit and document quality requirements. Requirements define “WHAT” the business needs in order to modify or improve its current-state process into the desired future state. The Requirements Producer acts as a liaison between the business owners who have a business need and the technical personnel who know “how” to develop automated solutions to support the business processes. Within a project life cycle methodology, the Requirements Producer is any individual who is responsible for gathering, analyzing, documenting, validating, and managing changes to the requirements.
Customer, both internal and external, involvement is identified as the most critical element to process improvement efforts. The goal of a successful Requirements Management Process is to get a consistent interpretation of the requirements from all the stakeholders (any persons with a vested interest in the project outcome). Every best-practice technique in the activities within the five-stage Requirements Management Process enforces the involvement of the customers and stakeholders. This course combines lecture, delivered by expert practitioners, a playful and fun learning environment, small-group and individual practice exercises, and class discussions on real-life requirements problems and solutions.
Practical Techniques Presented
- Stakeholder Profiling to identify all the right people to involve.
- User Profiling to identify the right subject matter experts.
- Brainstorming Idea-reduction Methods for effective solutions.
- Requirements Facilitation to reduce requirements-gathering time.
- Interviewing Preparations that increase the likelihood of asking the right questions.
- Documenting Assumptions to increase consistent interpretation and identify missing or inaccurate requirements.
- Analyzing Requirements to identity conflicts, constraints, dependencies, and risks.
- Representing Requirements using a standard, consistent format to increase communication effectiveness.
- Context Diagramming to identify the users of the business process and clarify scope.
- Formal Reviews to ensure stakeholder involvement and commitment.
- Ink-Free Sign-Off™ review process.
- Traceability Matrix to optimize change impact analysis, and reduce testing debugging efforts.
- Eliminating Ambiguities helps to reduce requirements errors and also increases communication effectiveness.
- Quality Characteristics to increase completeness, correctness, feasibility, and overall quality of the requirement statements.
- Requirements Baselining to ensure effective change control.
Objectives
- Understand the activities of the five-stage Requirements Management Process including roles that contribute to quality requirements.
- Learn how to recognize, classify and write different requirement types (business, user, functional and nonfunctional).
- Learn how to identify and involve the right people.
- Be able to write quality requirement statements utilizing standard formats.
- Be able to evaluate written requirements to improve clarity and ensure consistency of interpretation.
- Apply several learned techniques through hands-on exercises to give participants the confidence to use the techniques following their education experience.
- Be able to ask the right questions that ensure successful requirements-gathering interviews.
Intended Audiences
Business Analysts, Systems Analysts, Project Managers, Lead Developers and others who have primary responsibility for gathering, documenting, validating, and managing changes to requirements.