One would think that since requirements are the necessary and sufficient list of behaviors needed to meet the business goals, prioritization is a non-issue. Everything is necessary, so why prioritize? Prioritization becomes an issue in the following ways: The initial vision is too costly or time-consuming to implement, we must scale back. The development effort [...]

So it’s time for your organization to select requirements training for your business analysts, product managers, project managers, even developers. Here are some suggestions on what to look for! The obvious things to look for: Course Agenda – make sure the agenda is published and the topics seem relevant to your group. For example, if [...]

My wife and I recently set up one of our spare bedrooms using a bed frame that had been handed down in my family. We didn’t have a full size mattress to put in it, so I ended up shopping for a mattress last weekend. Mattress shopping was easy. Mattress buying – much more complicated, [...]

When I was a little girl, my teacher told our class that “Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance”. There are coarser versions of this bit of advice, but it is nevertheless true. SO, if you are starting a new requirements project, having a plan will help YOU to prevent poor performance, or at least to stave [...]

I joined a project which was trying to use Scrum. After a quick read of Agile Software Development with SCRUM by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle, I was intrigued. What Schwaber and Beedle had to say passed the “gut check” and I wanted to see it in practice. Their basic arguments which warrant exploring are: [...]

Our final suggestion on this topic is to Sit With Your Users. If your users are extremely busy, and the project involves changes to or replacement of an existing solution, then turn the challenge into an advantage. Sit beside the users while they perform their job tasks. Typically this is a good way to elicit [...]

We have now discussed the need to organize your time and prepare models in advance of the sessions. Today we suggest you Prepare Your Elicitation Questions in Advance One of the key steps to take prior to a stakeholder meeting is to prepare a list of questions to be asked during the meeting. These questions [...]

Last time we talked about organizing your time. Tips on how to organize your information are here or here. Today’s suggestion: Prepare Your Requirements Models In Advance Prepare draft requirements models in advance of the meeting. The reality is that good requirements analysts do in fact know quite a bit about the business processes and requirements. [...]

This is the first part of a four part series on how to prepare for software requirement sessions to be most effective with your users’ time (and yours!). Can You Get All of Your Requirements In One Session?There is general agreement in the software industry that talking to end users to gather requirements is critical [...]

Do you find that you’re always trying to use process flows on your projects, but they just don’t seem to fit your needs? Do you need to start modeling requirements, but can’t quite decide what models to use? There are quite a few requirements models out there to choose from, ranging from the mundane (process [...]