The purpose of this article is to provide guidelines for writing a paper if issues arise during a project and it is unclear how to proceed. A Business Analyst can add value by writing and gathering input for an options paper. It should ideally be a one side of A4 and provide the information required to enable senior… Read More »
Reasons for using story boards To act as an inspiration for other requirements. To increase understanding of the requirements between all stakeholders and the consequences. The system has not existed before. The users have no experience of the system. The users have been doing their work for some time and are stuck in the way they are doing… Read More »
For the purposes of this article the assumption is that estimations and planning are required for gathering system requirements. However it could equally be adapted for business requirements and other areas of the project development lifecycle. A use case model describes: System boundaries are Systems in scope for the project Use cases are The things the system in… Read More »
A entity relationship or class diagram can be used to resolve the problem when stakeholders are interchangeably using different words to mean the same thing. For the purposes of this article a conceptual model of a class diagram has been used. A conceptual model is at class level. A class is a group of data with similar characteristics.… Read More »
The pyramid above is a reminder of the top down approach. The goals need to be defined first, followed by an understanding of the business processes, the business requirements and then the system requirements. It can be very tempting for the business stakeholders to feel like they already know the solution and jump straight to the system requirements.… Read More »
Below are a number of sentences extracted from requirements documents. The techniques in this article use a NLP technique called the Meta model which can be used to identify ambiguity and where information is missing. For an introduction to what NLP is please read the introduction in the following article – How NLP can be used to improve… Read More »
The techniques in this article use a NLP technique called the Meta model which can be used to identify ambiguity and where information is missing. For an introduction to what NLP is please read the introduction in the following article – How NLP can be used to improve communication with stakeholders The Meta model was originally presented in… Read More »
This is part 2 of a previous article with the purpose of providing guidelines for gathering non-functional requirements (NFR’s). Part 1 explained What are Non Functional requirements, why they are so important and common mishaps. See brainstorming diagram below. This shows the different categories of non-functional requirements that need to be gathered and types of questions to ask. To… Read More »
It is really important that non-functional requirements are gathered early on and aren’t missed out. They are potentially more important than functional requirements. A non-functional requirement is a quality, constraint or behaviour that the system being built must meet. The consequences of missing these out are that the system being developed may not be adequate, has cost more… Read More »
Diagrams are essential to provide a clear, unambiguous picture. They can be put together in meetings, can make discussions easier than lots of text and are quicker and easier to do iterations and re-work. It is very easy to be tempted to start writing a document. However it will save time holding off until the diagrams are agreed.… Read More »