Greetings from Trento, Italy!  I am here at the IEEE RE’11 on behalf of Seilevel.  As part of my conference duties, I helped conduct a workshop on Monday on Requirements Engineering Education and Training (or REET) with Ljerka Beus-Dukic. The full program is here. We played a version of Seilevel’s  requirements-oriented game “Guess What We [...]

They didn’t know the product development manager would quit one week into the project due to a disagreement over the correct pronunciation of agile. They did not know that top management was working on a secret merger, so the scalability requirements have doubled. They did not know that the business process analyst would elope and [...]

A question was posed by a user on another forum to which I replied recently. The question is fundamental, deceptively simple and goes to the heart of requirements methodology. I thought the question important enough that it is worth posing in our forum. Below are the question from the user and my response in its [...]

In most of the projects you encounter, there is at least one person who has experience as a business analyst.  This person can be counted on to help derive the requirements and ensure that the features the business requires are built.  The problem arises when there is a larger body of work than there are [...]

What perils await a newly promoted business analyst as she enters the world of requirements gathering?

We just presented “Requirements Estimation” at the Austin IIBA Chapter meeting. James Hulgan from Seilevel gave the talk to a group of about 35 people. His talk was about how to use our software requirements Estimator tool which you can download from the post or our requirements templates page. I captured some of the questions and comments [...]

Alas, my CBAP app is finally submitted! Last week I read Laura Brandenburg’s post on her CBAP process and I laughed because it sounded a bit like my story: I have put it off getting my CBAP as long as I could, I’m dreading taking the test, and I’m having a baby in 4 months…so [...]

I was recently in a situation where I had to create some use cases for enhancements to an existing product very quickly.  The existing use cases were missing a lot of information.  My project sponsor would have preferred I not spend any time on the use cases.  On the other hand, I knew the QA [...]

First in a series of new Requirements Comix! Check back weekly for new panels, and let us know what you think.

Introduction to Strawman Models New projects often exist in a realm of ambiguity. Even if there is extensive documentation, while it helps, it is hard to be certain that we, as business analysts, have all of the right information to start working towards deriving requirements. While getting ramped up on a project, it is typical [...]