Archive of Business Analysis Articles

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.

There’s an article at RQNG with a very interesting discussion thread - do we need the role of a business analyst?

Product managers are often described as the hub or center of a software development organization. Saeed Khan takes umbrage with this under-appreciative image in an awesome article about information flow, product managers, and the SDLC.

We all know the story about the emperor’s new clothes. I’ve been thinking about prioritization and scheduling, and as far as I know, no one is promoting that we maximize value - they (and we) have been promoting that we do the most valuable stuff first. Doing the most valuable things first does not result in getting value the fastest. In this article, we show why not.

In About Face 2.0, Alan Cooper describes the elastic user as an ill-defined user who’s characteristics change to suit the needs of the developer - sometimes an expert and sometimes a novice. However, some of the otherwise good techniques for managing actors and use cases exacerbate this problem instead of alleviating it. How should we manage use cases while still getting the benefits of Cooper’s insight?

Almost a month ago, we published an article titled Broken Requirements Ecosystem. That article built on a discussion thread at Seilevel. Since that time, the original thread has grown, and a new one has been spawned at the Catalyze site.

In short, the question was asked on the Seilevel forum- why are specs sometimes ignored by developers, and four possible reasons were suggested.  We followed up with our view, and the discussion picked up again, this time at Catalyze.

1. Original discussion thread on Seilevel’s forum: Reasons Reqs Go Unread (Discussion from 19 Jun to 26 Jun )
2. Article at Tyner Blain: Broken Requirements Ecosystem (Written on 21 Jun, Discussion to 26 Jun)
3. Thread spawned on the Catalyze forum: Broken Requirements Ecosystem (Discussion from 23 Jun to 15 Jul)
Note - the dates above for each article/forum-post are as of right now. People have submitted 23 comments across the articles, showing a lot of good insight from many different perspectives. Developers, product managers, project managers, stakeholders - lots of great comments!

Even if you read our article before, go back and follow the discussions again - starting with Seilevel’s article, and progressing to ours, following up with the conversation at Catalyze.

In our ongoing exploration of how to meld the worlds of business rules and requirements, we look at an example use case and see how to extract the business rules.

We’ve written in the past about why it is important to gather and manage requirements. In short, you avoid some costly mistakes, and fix others before they become too expensive. We’ve also started exploring how business requirements and business rules live and play together. But why should we bother to separate business rules from requirements? One reason is to increase your company’s agility.

We had a great interview with James Taylor a couple weeks ago, where we talked about his new book, Smart (Enough) Systems, co-authored with Neil Raden.

James is an expert on decision management systems. I spent the late 1990s working on “rules-centric” software systems that allowed us to isolate rules and manage them seperately from other software requirements.

Traditional structured requirements approaches focus on the gathering and management of software requirements, but they gloss over the gathering and management of business rules.

James and I are exploring the best ways to bring these two points of view together.