Being a business analyst, I think it is fair to say, is not the most creative profession out there. We do have opportunities to write clear requirements, create interesting PowerPoint presentations from time to time, and choose an ingenious font color scheme to make status reports exciting and readable. But most of our time is [...]

Seilevel is kicking off 2013 with two training opportunities, one in New York and another in Iowa. We’ll be in each location for three days, and students can select from three classes (but we hope you’ll take all three). Locations/Dates: Des Moines: February 4-6 New York City: February 11-13 Los Angeles: March 19-21 The classes we’re [...]

Beyond adding visual flair to a requirements document, visual models enable what Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, calls “rapid cognition.” By streamlining information about any topic, visual models allow us to cut straight to the point without spending time sifting through unnecessary details. It’s hard to find a [...]

Welcome back! If you chose to read about Decision Tables in Part 1, go to paragraph 2 below. If you are continuing your journey from Decision Trees, go to paragraph 3 below. 2. Ah, you chose Decision Tables, a more compact method to view all of the available decisions at once. I created the Decision [...]

Joy Beatty will present June 10-11, 2012 at the Better Software Conference West. She’ll be part of the Business Analysis and Requirements Workshop, and will be participating in panels and presenting on Requirements Estimation (one of her most popular presentations) and Requirements Modeling. For those planning to attend Better Software West, you can register now [...]

Tony and I have a new book coming out in June: Visual Models for Software Requirements! Here is a sneak peek at what to expect. We start with an introduction to visualization in software requirements to explain what we mean by “models,” what the requirements modeling language (RML®) is, and why models are so important. [...]

Joy Beatty and Anthony Chen are co-authoring a book for Microsoft Press, and Visual Models for Software Requirements is now available for advance ordering on Amazon. This book will help business analysts, business analyst teams, and IT product managers apply best practices for capturing, analyzing, and implementing software requirements through visual models—and deliver better results [...]

The IT side of M&A integration involves much more than an integration of IT systems; due to the business risk involved, and in the effort to create value from the M&A, it will demand complete, accurate, consumable software requirements. Done properly, it should really start with a negotiation of business needs, with the system integration [...]

In Learning to Use Visual Requirements Models: Adding Context by “Overloading” the Business Data Diagram, the author tells us how to overload a Business Data Diagram (BDD).  One of the main goals with visual software requirements models is effective communication, so I tend to be “for” anything that furthers the cause. When I look at the author’s [...]

When helping Seilevel clients define software requirements, one of the many models we use is the Business Data Diagram (BDD). At a high level, the BDD is used to describe the relationships between business objects; in this way, it’s very similar to an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD). In this post, I’ll share how I learned [...]