Archive of Requirements gathering Articles

The first step of gathering requirements is to identify who can give you the requirements. Business processes include communication between different people inside the organization. Communication also includes people outside the organization. When gathering requirements, it can be easy to overlook the people who don’t use the software directly. Those people may still be stakeholders. Read on to see how to approach stakeholder analysis.

The wisdom of crowds helps us avoid stupid decisions. Unfortunately, it also prevents innovative, passionate, fantastic decisions. Collective Intelligence is collective insipidness. We need to keep the inputs of individuals in the mix.

Prototyping is invaluable for getting feedback on a design. It is also great for getting validation of requirements. It can even be used as a means to document the requirements. What level of fidelity should be used when getting feedback? Jan Miksovsky provides some guidance from the real world.

Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi, at OK/Cancel have written an article sharing the creative process they use for creating their awesome strips. Idea seeding is the process where they use time constraints and design/refine cycles to improve their ability to create quality “product.” They also wonder about extending this approach to other areas where brainstorming is normally used.

JAD is an acronym that stands for Joint Application Design. JAD sessions are collaborative meetings where the customers meet with developers to determine what the product needs to be or do.

The BABoK (Business Analyst Body of Knowledge) lists 10 techniques for gathering requirements. Here’s an overview of each one. For more details, check out the latest Guide to the BABoK.

Johanna Rothman just wrote an article titled Implicit Requirements are Still Requirements. She points out that her expectations were not met, even though her needs might have been. Johanna also implicitly begs the question - how do we gather implicit requirement?

Being effective at interviewing is key to gathering requirements effectively. We suggest six tips to make the interviewing process more effective and efficient.

Understanding someone’s perspective on requirements requires that you appreciate the context in which they’ve formed that perspective. Not everyone is playing the same game on the same field.

Prioritization can be hard, especially when we’re dealing with a lot of variables. Peter Abilla, at shmula.com takes a fairly esoteric tool (interrelation digraphs) and applies it as a prioritization tool. Opthamologists have learned that they can’t show us a bunch of blurry images and have us tell them which one looks the best, and then prescribe a corrective lense. They have to ask us “Is it better like this? Or better like this?” Peter’s approach does the same thing, but with a quantitative edge.