Have you ever noticed that the skills you have as a product manager or as a business analyst can transfer to other aspects of your life? I find myself in that exact situation, and having the skills to elicit requirements is proving to be very useful! My mother recently experienced a life changing event, one [...]

This is the 5th  International Workshop on Requirements Engineering Education and Training (REET’10) Held in conjunction with the 18th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE’10) The workshop will be held in Sydney, Australia on Tuesday 28th September 2010. This workshop will address issues related to RE education, both as part of a formal university degree and [...]

As consultants and product managers, it is important that we quickly build and maintain credibility with our team so that we can work productively and effectively.   If you are unable to join the team dynamics, the work that we provide will be met with apathy or even outright hostility.  I’ve learned a few tips to help establish credibility [...]

At the beginning of almost every project (and even sometimes midway through them) we are asked to create a requirements plan and estimate the time required on tasks and the number of BAs necessary to execute it. In a later post I’ll talk about the actual plan items, but we do have a rule of [...]

Number 4 in the series, “How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot: 7 ways to do software requirements poorly to set your project up for failure and what to do instead.” Short-change Time Spent on Software Requirements or Don’t do Them at All Don’t Listen to Your Customer’s Needs Don’t use models Use weasel words [...]

Here is a twist to the response to the question – what exactly does a Requirements Engineer do?  I have seen quite a few responses that range from the funny to the factual to downright confusing.  At a basic level, we define what software is supposed to do.  But that is like saying a doctor [...]

Do you really love writing requirements? This is the place for you! At Seilevel we are serious about requirements and designing software. Our mission is to redefine the way companies create software requirements. Due to our high level of customer referenceability we have a tremendous backlog of work and need to expand our staff. We [...]

James Hulgan at Seilevel will be presenting: ‘How to use Business Data Diagrams to Derive Use Cases & UAT Scenarios’ You don’t want to miss this! Summary: Most Business Analysts have at least a passing familiarity with Entity Relationship Diagrams, or ERD’s, and their use by DBAs and Data Architects to model logical and physical data [...]

I am all for great tools and processes that increase efficiency of work, facilitate better accuracy, allow for repeatable results, so on and so forth. But sometimes they simply do not fit.  Yes, I just said better is not always good.  Why?  Spending time trying to improve tools or processes on short turnaround projects or [...]

It seems like many of the projects that we are implementing these days are large system migrations.  Typically they are 20 year old mainframe systems that are being converted into new technology. Unfortunately these systems usually have no documentation so no one really knows how they work. Here are some tips for modeling these systems [...]