[SPOILER WARNING - Seilevel asks that any Lisa Frank fans please not read this article] A: Unicorns don’t exist. This is a commonly known fact in most circles, but not in the requirements game. There is a strong tendency for a lot of people to spend a lot of time discussing intricate details of systems [...]

I’m not sure how this came up, but when you get a collection of requirements experts in a room for social occasions, odd things happen. Sometimes, those odd things take the form of limericks (only because we decided that we’d already done Requirements Haikus to death). Among the entries: There once was a user named [...]

In the early days of the Internet, my then-CEO had no problems selling a complete copy of our proprietary database in lieu of the normal subscription fee. When I asked him why he was willing to do so, he smiled and said “It will be worthless in a year. There’s no way they can maintain [...]

Posted by Special Guest Contributor – Ginger Nedblake A few months ago, I started a strength training class with a trainer, Mandy. Twice a week I submit myself to her will in the hopes of achieving my fitness goals. And from my very first meeting with her, I realized that my job of requirements analyst [...]

Certain methodologies suggest that you identify system Actors early on in the process of defining your problem and solution. I think this is a great idea, and this is why. Identifying the Actors early on in you process helps define the boundaries of the business context. By knowing the ‘Who’ you have in effect defined [...]

As you may have surmised from other posts, I’m a daddy. I have an almost-two-year-old little boy who, as his age would suggest, is in the midst of the “terrible twos” (by the way, most people I’ve talked to about the phenomenon agree that it starts around 18 months and lasts until college). He’s extremely [...]

We often spend the majority of our modeling time on use cases, process flow diagrams, and other tools that model behavior. These behavior models are great tools for driving out functional requirements but they don’t explicitly address all of the data objects, attributes, and relationships associated with the behavior. For that we need a set [...]

Much of the training that we give business analysts relates to requirements elicitation from Subject Matter Experts. We help business analysts to make the appropriate preparations for interviews, and teach them how to ask the right questions to get to “the heart of the matter” without being experts themselves. However, on large projects of long [...]

1. Identify the Problem(Common techniques used to find the problems behind the problem are brainstorming, fishbone diagrams and Pareto diagrams.) 1. Ask the group: What are the problems (aka business opportunities)?2. Write down each problem and see if everyone agrees.3. Then ask the group again: What is the problem, really?4. Continue to ask “why?” to [...]