Requirement Gathering

Requirement Gathering is the process of determining, documenting, and managing stakeholder needs and requirements to meet project objectives.
The key benefit of this process is that it provides the basis for defining and
managing the project scope including product scope.

Requirement Gathering Input:

• Scope Management Plan:
  • The scope management plan is a component of the project management plan that establishes the activities for developing, monitoring, and controlling the project scope.
• Project Charter:
  • Project Charter provides the high-level project description and product characteristics. It also contains project approval requirements. If a project charter is not used in the performing organization, then comparable information needs to be acquired or developed, and used as a basis for the detailed project scope statement.
    Organizations that do not produce a formal project charter will usually perform an informal analysis to identify the content necessary for further scope planning.

Techniques to Requirement Gathering:

• Interviews:
  • An interview is a formal or informal approach to elicit information from stakeholders by talking to them directly. It is typically performed by asking prepared and spontaneous questions and recording the responses.
• Focus Groups:
  • Focus groups bring together prequalified stakeholders and subject matter experts to learn about their expectations and attitudes about a proposed product, service, or result. A trained moderator guides the group through an interactive discussion, designed to be more conversational than a one-on-one interview.
• Facilitated Workshops:
  • Facilitated workshops are focused sessions that bring key stakeholders together to define product requirements.
  • Workshops are considered a primary technique for quickly defining cross-functional requirements and reconciling stakeholder differences.
• Group Creativity Techniques: Several group activities can be organized to identify project and product requirements. Some of the group creativity techniques that can be used are:
  • Brainstorming: A technique used to generate and collect multiple ideas related to project and product requirements. Although brainstorming by itself does not include voting or prioritization, it is often used with other group creativity techniques that do.
  • Nominal group technique: A technique that enhances brainstorming with a voting process used to rank the most useful ideas for further brainstorming or for prioritization.
  • Idea/mind mapping: A technique in which ideas created through individual brainstorming sessions are consolidated into a single map to reflect commonality and differences in understanding, and generate new ideas.
  • Affinity diagram: A technique that allows large numbers of ideas to be classified into groups for review and analysis.
  • Multicriteria decision analysis: A technique that utilizes a decision matrix to provide a systematic analytical approach for establishing criteria, such as risk levels, uncertainty, and valuation, to evaluate and rank many ideas.
• Group Decision-Making Techniques: A group decision-making technique is an assessment process having multiple alternatives with an expected outcome in the form of future actions. These techniques can be used to generate, classify, and prioritize product requirements. There are various methods of reaching a group decision, such as:
  • Unanimity: A decision that is reached whereby everyone agrees on a single course of action. One way to reach unanimity is the Delphi technique, in which a selected group of experts answers questionnaires and provides feedback regarding the responses from each round of requirements gathering. The responses are only available to the facilitator to maintain anonymity.
  • Majority: A decision that is reached with support obtained from more than 50 % of the members of the group. Having a group size with an uneven number of participants can ensure that a decision will be reached, rather than resulting in a tie.
  • Plurality: A decision that is reached whereby the largest block in a group decides, even if a majority is not achieved. This method is generally used when the number of options nominated is more than two.
  • Dictatorship: In this method, one individual makes the decision for the group.

Case Study:
You want to build a new a online application for your business of renting a taxi. Your team, group of 10 members doing Group discussion on outsourcing all the work a single vendor or to different vendors. There is difference in opinion in all members.  Now lets see what numbers required  to decide which Group making techniques will be used.

• Unanimity: If ALL the participating members agree to a single decision either with one Vendor or different Vendor
• Majority: If more than 5 members agree to single decision either with one Vendor or different Vendor
• Plurality: If 4 members agree for single vendor, 3 members agree for different vendors and 3 members agree to Do it ourselves.
• Dictatorship: Owner of the business decide to do it ourselves without consent from any of the team member.

 

• Questionnaires and Surveys:
  • Questionnaires and surveys are written sets of questions designed to quickly accumulate information from a large number of respondents.
  • Questionnaires and/or surveys are most appropriate with varied audiences, when a quick turnaround is needed, when respondents are geographically dispersed, and where statistical analysis is appropriate.
• Prototypes:
  • Prototyping is a method of obtaining early feedback on requirements by providing a working model of the expected product before actually building it.
  • Since a prototype is tangible, it allows stakeholders to experiment with a model of the final product rather than being limited to discussing abstract representations of their requirements.
• Requirement Documentations:
  • Requirements documentation describes how individual requirements meet the business need for the project.
  • Requirements may start out at a high level and become progressively more detailed as more about the requirements is known. Before being baselined, requirements need to be unambiguous (measurable and testable), traceable complete, consistent, and acceptable to key stakeholders.

Requirement Gathering Output:

Components of Requirement document can include:

• Business and Project objectives
• Business Rules
• Impacts to other systems
• Functional and Non functional requirements
• Technology and Standard Compliance requirements
• Quality Requirements
• Performance Requirement
• Acceptance Criteria
• Assumptions, Dependencies and Constraints
• RTM – The requirements traceability matrix is a grid that links product requirements from their origin to the deliverables that satisfy them

Documenting the requirement:

• Waterfall Methodology :

Use case – Create an application for  new client

Summary	Actor should be able to create a new client in the application
Primary Actors	Commercial – All
Secondary Actors	None
Assumptions	Customer does not exist
Business Rules	Customer should be US citizen
Trigger(s)	User clicks on “New Client” on Client page OR Search Result page OR Dashboard OR Create Quote
Pre-conditions	User has authority to create new clients
Post-conditions	Client created and user can initiate new quote creation
Related Use Cases	US_PTM_03
User Interface	Refer to UI Mock-up and Data dictionary document
References	NA

 

Agile Methodology

A user story represents a small piece of business value that a team can deliver in an iteration. While traditional requirements (like use cases) try to be as detailed as possible, a user story is defined incrementally, in three stages:

• As a /an
• I want to..
• So that..