Archive of Business Analysis Articles

In our earlier article about managing stakeholder goals, we looked at the relationships between principal stakeholder goals and end-user stakeholder goals. We also showed a way to trace those dependencies. But that approach does not provide us with any insight about the alignment (or lack thereof) between differing goals. This article explores a means to visualize those relationships.

A couple weeks ago we wrote about Outside-in Software Development, by Carl Kessler and John Sweitzer. One of their ideas about stakeholders and goals has got us thinking about traceability.

We create cost estimates at many times in a project. From budgetary estimates at the start of a project all the way to PERT estimates of tasks in a work breakdown structure. Creating a budgetary estimate seems impossible - you have to make many assumptions, your estimates are based on the unknown - they can’t be good. There are ways to make budgetary estimates easier to generate and refine - but they can create a sense of false precision.

We’ve written before about the importance of separating rules from requirements, particularly in use cases. We wrote that with the goal in mind of reducing the costs of system maintenance. Low-level rules like decision, calculation and inference rules tend to change frequently - and independently of other requirements. So a documentation approach that separates these rules from requirements can both reduce implementation costs (by encouraging separated implementation) and reduce the time required to manage and approve changes.

There are also benefits to abstracting high-level, or procedural rules, when dealing with global business requirements.

Each elicitation technique we have in our toolbox is a tool. But not every elicitation job is the same. If we have a hammer, we might be working with nails, or screws, or even an egg. In our analysis, we have to develop a deep understanding of our customer’s business(es). And that means we need to understand not only the goals and ROI, but the processes, rules, and requirements. Which is the right tool for each job?

Separation of business rules from requirements is a good thing. Not because of semantic distinctions, but because it allows you to write better software, write it faster, and change it more easily. This article is a response to an excellent comment on our recent article about hidden business rules. Thanks for challenging the idea - it either eliminates it from discourse or makes it stronger, and we all benefit. Here’s an attempt to make it stronger.

The 10th International Business Rules Forum is coming up fast in October 2007. Scott Sehlhorst and James Taylor will be presenting Getting it Right. Rules and Requirements in Software on Thursday at the conference. The articles on rules and requirements that he and I have been publishing on our blogs for the last few months are leading to this presentation. The IBRF has graciously offered a 10% registration discount code to readers of Tyner Blain. Read on to get it.

Business rules are not requirements. Yet they are often gathered at the same time as requirements, from the same sources, by the same business analysts. And unfortunately, often documented in the same artifacts. In this article we look at some of the ways that business rules are commonly hidden inside use cases.

How do you prevent analysis paralysis? That’s the question Barbara opens up for discussion on the Business Analyst Blog. The answer is somewhat simple. You stop as soon as you believe you have something that reasonably covers the goals (or use cases) that you are trying to address. When you have requirement completeness, you move on. This answer is both naive and enlightened- especially when you consider the benefits of an agile development process.

What is the right level of detail for writing requirements? What about for writing specifications (functional, non-functional requirements, etc)? The answer is that there is no one answer. But there are guidelines, and reasons to write more detail, or less detail - for any given product or project, and any given team. The reason we write requirements is so that they can be read. Understanding the readers is the key to determining which details to include in the requirements.