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 [...]
There are at least three good reasons to map software requirements to process flows. In this post, you’ll learn why I’ve mapped requirements to process flows in order to: Elicit more requirements, for completeness. Ensure traceability. Demonstrate completeness. We produce models to derive and support our requirements. To demonstrate that we’ve captured the software requirements [...]
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 [...]
Happy New Year! Seilevel blog writers Betsy Stockdale and Balaji Vijayan have new articles published – Betsy on BA Times, Balaji on Modern Analyst – and yours truly, Seilevel’s blog editor, has a post on IT Toolbox. For Betsy’s article on using business objectives to control scope, visit BA Times here: http://www.batimes.com/articles/using-business-objectives-to-control-scope.html To see Balaji’s [...]
Visual models are key to software requirements gathering because they allow us to find the missing requirements and understand the information in different ways. In video three, “Visual models for Software Requirements Gathering” we talk about a language of visualization models, RML®. Send us an email to learn more about software requirements gathering training. If [...]
On this blog, we discuss everything about software requirements.
This is your resource for posts on Business Requirements Analysis, Requirements Elicitation, Facilitation and Traceability, and best practices and tips for Business Analysts and Business Architects, direct from the expert practitioners at Seilevel. You'll find software requirements "how tos," opinions, best practices, tips, and information on Requirements Modeling Language (RML), Requirements Object Model (ROM), working with use cases, and other documentation such as BRD/SRS.
This blog features helpful tips on picking Requirements Tools, and even selecting a vendor. We also post on Waterfall and Agile development, and provide helpful advice for requirements planning, tracking and metrics.
If you are a member of IIBA, are a CBAP or CCBA, a new business analyst, or an IT product manager, project manager, requirements analyst, this blog is a great resource for professional growth and career advancement.
And if you're a business architect or manage business analysts, want to mature your business analyst organization, or want to cut scope while increasing value, you've found the right community.
