Crafting High Quality Requirements

Course overview

Whether outsourced or in-house, every IT development project needs exceptional requirements management. Up to seventy percent of IT project failures are tied directly to poor requirements management. Learn to develop key skills required to reduce requirements-driven causes of project failure. Develop tools and techniques to use throughout the requirements process, methods to conduct an inspection, and ways to reduce risks.

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.

Course objectives

• Identify the main problems encountered when managing requirements
• Write clear and concise requirements
• Develop a Requirements Traceability Matrix and a requirements specification document
• Define appropriate classifications for project requirements
• Explain the roles and responsibilities involved in managing requirements
• Identify the differences among requirements specification standards
• Select and monitor performance metrics for requirements management activities

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

Overview

• Explain why good requirements are critical for project success
• Differentiate between behavioral and non-behavioral requirements
• Determine the hallmarks of a good requirements process

Requirements in the IT/IS Development Process

• Use a “best practice” model for requirements as viewed through the Software Engineering
• Institute’s SW-CMM
• Determine differences in requirements gathering based upon the SDLC model used
• Explain the importance of making requirements gathering a repeatable process

Setup and Startup

• Identify the key requirements stakeholders and conduct a stakeholder analysis
• Identify hard and soft resources of requirements
• Explain the inputs and outputs of a requirements repository and define a requirements classification scheme

Identify and Document

• Collect and clarify requirements using surveys, interviews, JRP/JAD sessions, workshops, simulations, usability studies, and prototypes
• Prepare requirements documents
• Describe the attributes of system requirements specifications and requirements traceability matrices

Analyze and Refine

• Describe the role of the requirements analyst
• Explain partitioning and decomposition of requirements
• Identify the usefulness of prototyping and modeling

Review and Approve

• Describe the review and approval process
• Determine the inspection process
• Discuss the roles and responsibilities of the inspection team

Allocate and Trace

• Explain the importance of the requirements allocations and traceability
• Allocate requirements
• Track requirements throughout the project life cycle

Verify and Validate

• Discuss verification and validation techniques
• Be able to validate requirements with clients
• Demonstrate that requirements have been satisfied

Change Management

• Use change control tools
• Incorporate changes to project requirements
• Ensure that links are traceable throughout project documentation