A nice trick that business analysts can use now that collaboration technology like Google Docs exists is to allow meeting participants to simultaneously collaborate on documents during the meeting itself.  Simply have everyone in your meeting open up the document on their own computer, and then everyone can edit the document together in real time.  [...]

Joy Beatty and Anthony Oden discuss the top questions about managing software requirements with global teams. What skills do you need to develop in your teams? What process frameworks should you put in place? What requirement tools are available and which should you consider? Introduction to Joy and Anthony. Joy kicks off the Webinar by [...]

What 5 measures can you use as personal objectives? On the modern analyst forum, Andrea asked the question “I have been asked to come up with 5 personal “Management Business Objectives” for myself in my position as Business Systems Analyst. I need to have them by the end of January and I can’t really come [...]

Right now, my business analyst work is with data that is stored in an XML file. I’m only interested in about 10% of the tags in the XML and I often need to scan the entire file for a value in a given tag.  Notepad++ is a great editor for this. It lets me search a [...]

On a recent project, I found myself cobbling together spreadsheets which included a lot of the data elements from some of my Visio diagrams.  One such case occurred early on in the project, when I was reviewing a feature tree with stakeholders, and attempting to map branches of the feature tree to various Subject Matter [...]

We had a busy day of software requirements filming at Seilevel headquarters this week! Seilevel was tapped by eDev Tech for a segment on requirements tools for an upcoming TV show about software productivity. It will be broadcast on major cable networks as well as Direct TV and university networks. Joy presented a brief field [...]

Once upon a time, people built pyramids, space shuttles, VCRs, and tons of software—all without requirements management tools. Some of these projects were unsuccessful, but a lot of them were. So, why are there dozens of companies selling requirements management tools? Why should you use one? They can be expensive, take time to learn, and the value that you [...]

Like many of us, I’ve been known to mumble disparaging remarks about Microsoft under my breath while using their tools. But, I have to say there is at least one thing they did right – the format painter. I run into enough people who don’t know about this that I think it is worth mentioning. Do [...]

Happy SeiHolidays! Over the next two weeks, we will bring back some of the most heavily-commented-upon blog posts on Seilevel’s Requirements Defined blog. First up: “4 Tips to Not Destroy Your Project…“ Joy Beatty wrote, “A year ago, I was working on a project where we created a list of features in Excel to help [...]

This year’s requirements tool evaluation research generated lots of interest, and lots of questions/comments (despite some challenges with our template downloads). Read on for more… Joy Beatty wrote, “Phase 2 of our requirements management tool research is complete! We have posted the criteria and tool scores in a downloadable Excel document, though we have a [...]