Document Analysis is a technique used to gather requirements during the requirements elicitation phase of a project.  It describes the act of reviewing the existing documentation of comparable business processes or systems in order to extract pieces of information that are relevant to the current project, and therefore should be consider projects requirements.

Business analysts can elicit requirements in many ways, and eliciting them from stakeholders using questionnaires, interviews, or facilitating sessions are most common.  However document analysis is particularly valuable when replacing one or more existing systems with a new system that will offer increased functionality or a better overall user experience.  Existing documentation can be scoured for an understanding of key functions, business rules, business entities, and business entity attributes.  Document analysis may also be necessary when stakeholders are not available to offer insight into existing business processes or systems.

Some forms of documents that are useful in document analysis may be obvious, while others less so.  Here is a list of potential documents that an analyst should consider reviewing based on their particular project type.

• Benchmarking studies
  
• Business plans
  
• Business process and procedure documentation
  
• Company memos
  
• Competing product literature and reviews
  
• Customer contracts
  
• Customer suggestions
  
• Requests for proposals
  
• System defect reports
  
• System specifications (of existing systems)
  
• Training guides
  
• Vision documents for related projects