Crafting High Quality Requirements

Course overview

Whether outsourced or in-house, every development project needs exceptional requirements management. This course provides the necessary information to develop a proactive environment for requirements gathering and analysis and explains how to introduce lean process thinking to right-size the requirements analysis process. Learn the practical skills required to succeed and grow in the business analyst role, effectively communicate requirements to the technical team before solutions are designed and implemented, and create key deliverable documents.

Prerequisites

• A comprehensive introductory business analysis course such as Principles of Business Analysis (HE551S)

Audience

• This course is intended for business analysts and related professionals such as Project Managers, QA Managers, Project Customers, Technical Leads, Systems Engineers or anyone with a substantive role in the success of projects
• By successfully completing this course, the participant earns 24 educational contact hours or CDUs which may be applied to meet IIBA® requirements for initial or continuing certification
• By successfully completing this course, the participant earns 21 educational contact hours or PDUs which may be applied to meet PMI® requirements for initial or continuing certification requirements

Course objectives

• Describe the responsibilities of the Business Analyst ( BA) and the major deliverables in the business systems requirements analysis process
• Prepare an elicitation plan tailored to the project environment and the development life cycle
• Analyze requirements using key modeling techniques
• Recognize and compose clear requirements statements
• Create high-level models employing use cases to confirm project scope (1st iteration, to confirm user needs (2nd iteration) and to specify user requirements (3rd iteration)
• Examine the value of both documenting requirements to aid project stakeholders in structuring requirements for use, and validating requirements to determine when a project can proceed to design

Next steps

• Advanced Business Analysis topics such as Verifying and Validating the Solution(HE556S)

Benefits to you

• Identify, document, analyze, and track requirements throughout a project's life cycle
• Develop a proactive environment for requirements gathering and analysis
• Reduce requirements-driven causes of project failure
• Create best practice templates and documents to reduce requirements induced defects

Course outline

Key Business Solution Concepts

• Introduction to requirements
• Value and challenges of requirements
• Requirements and BA knowledge areas
• Projects and BA responsibilities

Eliciting Requirements

• The purpose of formal requirements elicitation
• Elicitation techniques for gathering requirements
• Overcoming common elicitation challenges

Analyze Requirements

• Requirements analysis activities
• Key model types
• Steps of the requirements analysis process
• Major analysis classifications

Writing Requirements

• The importance of good requirements
• Characteristics of a good requirement statement
• Writing good requirements

Confirming Project Scope with Use Cases

• Use Case Model and scope
• The first iteration of a model
• Key use case elements
• Key deliverables from the first iteration

Confirming User Requirements with Use Cases

• The second iteration of a model
• Elements needed to refine a use case
• Key deliverables from the second iteration

Specifying Requirements with Use Cases

• The specification process
• Key attributes for functional requirements
• Supplemental requirements and performance characteristics
• Specification techniques
• Wireframes
• Overcoming tailoring challenges

Documenting and Validating Requirements

• Requirements documentation
• Documentation and validation deliverables and best practices