Hello,

What is the best answer when asked the following question?

What are the steps that you take when gathering requirements?

Thanks for your help!

Nadia

Hi Nadia,

As Craig mentioned there is no one answer to your question.  Perhaps you could give more context to the question: is this for a job interview?  Are you looking for a set process you can follow?

The BABOK does speak to various activities that you perform as part of requirements elicitation but not necessarily in a particular order which can give you ideas of some of the techniques you can use and things that should be done more often than not as part of the process.

If you're looking for a practical answer to a real world scenario, I'd suggest answering these questions yourself:

• What is it that you want to have completed when you're done gathering requirements (documents, etc.)

• Who do you need to communicate with in order to gather requirements and how can you interact with them?

• What sort of timeframe do you have to accomplish your desired outputs?

• What tools do you have to help you gather and document information?

• Who needs to see your outputs and what do they need to do with them (validate, review, approve, etc.)?

Once you have thought about the parameters that will influence what you need to do and how you need to do it, the actual steps you need to perform become pretty self-evident.  For instance, if you say you need to have a list of requiments that was elicited and vetted from your end users who live halfway around the world, and you have access to web conferencing tools and have two weeks to get things done, you quickly realize what sort of things you need to do in order to accomplish your goal (schedule online meetings, review what is needed in your requirements document, prepare questions and activities to elicit information, document results, prepare draft, review with group, etc.).

Hello Craig,

Thank you for your response. I found a book; " Use Cases: Requirements in Context (2nd Edition) - Daryl Kulak." Looking at the content, it looks like a great book. What do you think?

Thanks,

Nadia