Requirements Analysis (BABOK KA)

Effective communication among application development project stakeholders is often challenging, especially when the team is geographically distributed or time constrained. IBM® Rational® software helps organizations automate, integrate, and govern the core business process of software and systems delivery via the IBM Rational Software Delivery Pla...

Not all requirements are created equal, so to make smart choices about which product requirements you should explore and implement—or whether you should delve into them at all—you need to prioritize them. Many teams do not prioritize properly and waste time specifying requirements that are never delivered. Why spend time and energy on r...

In the last few years, the agile software development movement has created a paradigm shift in how we work to understand system requirements. Agile teams shape software systems using a collaborative process, with executable software at its heart and documents marginalised to a peripheral role. This creates a fundamental shift away from tools for ma...

Some of you may be working on systems with many complex relationships between the parts. These complex systems may be described as a system of systems, or may be described as a product line, or perhaps both at once.

In these cases, you will often find that the requirements of a large, overall system are shared among a number of related projects, each of which implements some well-defined part of the overall system.

Author: Geri Schneider Winters

Be it explicitly or not, someone always performs the role of requirements analyst on a software project. The official title may be requirements engineer, business analyst, system analyst, product manager, or simply analyst , but someone needs to translate multiple perspectives into a requirements specification and communicate with other stakeholder...

Given a specific project with a reasonably defined charter and clear business goals you, the business analyst, set out to elicit and document the detailed business requirements. So when do you stop? How do you know when you are done gathering the requirements?

Traditional software development has always required a long requirements-gathering phase at the beginning of a project that, if not handled correctly, can often result in schedule delays and costly budget overruns that have a significant impact on the project itself.  Software simulation can streamline that process and prevent many of the erro...

Many of the characteristics of properly specified requirements have been well known for many years, at least among professional requirements engineers. Yet most requirements specifications seen today in industry still include many poor-quality requirements. Far too many requirements are ambiguous, incomplete, inconsistent, incorrect, infeasible, un...

Maybe it was that southern drawl. Or maybe it was because I got mad. I'm not sure why I still remember this moment so clearly, but I do.  It happened when I was at Spyglass, over ten years ago.  Several of us developers were in a meeting with Steve Stone, then recently-hired as director of the Champaign office.  We were talking abo...

In this column, I summarize the 12 worst of the most common requirements engineering problems I have observed over many years working on and with real projects as a requirements engineer, consultant, trainer, and evaluator. I also list the negative consequences of these problems, and most importantly suggest some industry best practices that can he...

Many managers and others who are not professional requirements engineers tend to greatly over-simplify requirements engineering (RE). Based on their observations that requirements specifications primarily contain narrative English textual statements of individual requirements and that all members of the engineering team are reasonably literate, the...

Customers are never thrilled to find out they can’t get all the features they want in release 1.0 of a new software product (at least, not if they want the features to work). However, if the development team cannot deliver every requirement by the scheduled initial delivery date, the project stakeholders must agree on which subset to implemen...

The path to quality software begins with excellent requirements. Slighting the processes of requirements development and management is a common cause of software project frustration and failure. This article describes ten common traps that software projects can encounter if team members and customers don’t take requirements seriously. I descr...

Beware of the colleague or supplier who spends large amounts of time in meetings discussing the format, sequence, and wording of documents they will deliver and very little time on the actual content. Strategically, substance is what counts. In this issue of Strategic Software Engineering I will point to some common problems when form becomes a hig...

Some days, you wish you had telepathy. You just know that your development staff is holding back in some way, but you don’t know how to get them to communicate. Is the project in trouble, but they’re afraid to tell you? Since your software development staff won’t tell you what they’re really thinking, I asked them to confide in us instead. I pose...