Eliciting, Collecting and Developing Requirements

Eliciting, Collecting and Developing Requirements Workshops

Requirements define the capabilities that a system must have or properties of that system that meet the users’ needs to perform a specific set of tasks within a defined scope.

Systems engineers (SEs) are expected to be able to elicit business, mission and operational needs of all a project’s stakeholders. Additionally, SEs must analyze, integrate, and transform these needs into system requirements as well as to facilitate stakeholder engagement on and resolution of requirements. Finally, SEs are expected to be able to tailor the principles of requirements elicitation to different development methodologies.

Following the assessment of operational needs and high–level concept definitions are completed, it then becomes necessary to discover, elicit, collect, define and analyze requirements. These requirements typically cover various aspects of a system — everything from user needs to behavioral, quality and implementation.

From these, SEs analyze, transform and integrate stakeholders’ needs into system requirements.

Good communications is essential when eliciting, collecting and developing requirements. This is due to the need to collect requirements from many sources including new and experienced users, managers, users’ customers and other stakeholders of all types.

Operational users are key contributors because they provide some or all requirements for the system’s functional and performance capabilities and user interface. Their inputs are essential to delivering a product, system, or service that helps improve their efficiency by enabling them to easily access the data they need when they need it.

The SE must elicit requirements directly or indirectly based on users’ informal narratives, observing the user environment, or capturing their responses to targeted questions.

Eliciting, Collecting and Developing Requirements Training Specifics

Eliciting, collecting, and developing requirements training shows participants how to elicit requirements for a project. It will introduce you to various analytical, mathematical, and non-analytical methods and models of collecting information. This workshop will also instruct about the common challenges, disadvantages, and concerns associated with each method and technique.

Participants will gain the knowledge and skills necessary to understand, communicate, elicit, and validate stakeholder needs and requirements applied to requirements development process.

Eliciting, collecting, and developing requirements workshop will help you prevent project failure by developing and improving your skills to successfully gather and document project requirements. You will actively design the collections requirement process, plan the requirements document, and choose a collection tool suitable to your project’s data. By the end of this workshop, you will be able to use key concepts to guarantee your project success.

Eliciting, collecting, and developing requirements workshop is an interactive course combined of several labs, group activities, practical exercises, real-world case studies and hands-on seminars.

Audience

• Project managers
• Project engineers
• Software engineers
• Design team personnel
• R&D personnel
• Business analyst
• All individuals who are involved in the processes of collecting data and eliciting requirements in various projects

Learning Objectives

Upon the completion of eliciting, collecting and developing requirements workshop, the attendees are able to:

• Analyze the validity of previously-produced project requirements
• Identify relevant stakeholders and other sources of information for each high-level requirement
• Create a framework for a requirements document
• Choose appropriate tools for requirements collection and determine the rationale for their selection
• Elicit thorough, accurate, and traceable requirements by applying different tools
• Conduct interviews with stakeholders to analyze and validate their needs
• Learn about various communication skills to interact with stakeholders
• Gather a complete set of requirements based on the business needs and stakeholder goals in order to meet project objectives
• Conduct requirement workshops to assist hard data collection and documentation of the requirements
• Define the capability scope
• Apply best practices of data elicitation

Course Outline

Overview of Eliciting, Collecting and Developing Requirements

• Eliciting requirements definition
• Basics of eliciting requirements
• Terminology
• Definition of requirements
• Some background
• Issues of elicitation
• Gathering and documenting requirements
• Agile requirements development
• Eliciting methods and techniques

Requirements Elicitation Problems

• Problems of scope
• Problems of understanding
• Problems of volatility

Current Elicitation Techniques

• Information gathering
• Requirements expression and analysis
• Verification and validation

An Elicitation Methodology Framework

• Requirements elicitation process model
• Methodology
• Integration of techniques
  • Fact-finding
  • Requirements gathering
  • Analysis and rationalization
  • Prioritization
  • Integration and validation
• Criteria assessment

Data Collection and Reporting Procedures

• Management of data collection and reporting
• Designing the data collection instrument
• Data collection
• Data preparation and processing
• Reporting and dissemination of data

Agile Requirements Modeling

• Initial requirements foreseeing
• Iteration modeling
• JIT model storming
• Acceptance test-driven development (ATDD)

Eliciting Tools

• Hard data gathering
• Interviews
• Questionnaire
• Group techniques
• Participant observation
• Ethnomethodology
• Knowledge elicitation techniques

Traditional Elicitation Approaches

• Introspection
• Reading existing documents
• Analyzing hard data
• Interviews
• Surveys / Questionnaires
• Meetings

Collaborative Elicitation Approaches

• Focus Groups
• Brainstorming
• JAD/RAD workshops
• Prototyping
• Participatory plan

Contextual Elicitation Approaches

• Ethnographic methods
• Participant observation
• Ethnomethodology
• Discourse evaluation
• Conversation assessment
• Speech act assessment
• Sociotechnical techniques
• Soft systems evaluation

Cognitive Elicitation Approaches

• Task analysis
• Protocol assessment
• Knowledge attainment methods
  • Card sorting
  • Laddering
  • Repertory grids
  • Proximity scaling techniques

Data Collection from Written Sources

• Sources of information
• Benefits
• Disadvantages
• Applications

Hard Data Collection

• What is considered as hard data?
• Sampling methods
  • Purposive sampling
  • Random sampling
  • Stratified random sampling
  • Clustered random sampling
• Size of sampling
• Sampling process

Interviews

• Types of interview
  • Structured
  • Open-ended
• Advantages
  • Rich collection of data
  • Good for uncovering opinions, feelings, goals, as well as hard facts
  • Can probe in-depth, & adapt follow up questions to what the person tells you
• Drawbacks
  • Hard to analyze a great amount of qualitative data
  • Hard to compare various respondents
  • Interviewing is a challenging skill
• Concerns
  • Unanswerable questions
  • Implicit information
  • Removal from context
  • Interviewer’s attitude may cause bias
• Some useful tips
  • Starting off tips
  • Obtain permission to record the interview
  • Ask the straightforward questions first
  • Follow up interesting leads
  • Leave open-ended questions for the end

Questionnaires

• Advantages
  • Can quickly gather info from large numbers of people
  • Can be managed remotely
  • Can gather manners, beliefs, characteristics
• Disadvantages
  • Simplistic categories generate so little material
  • No chance for users to take their real needs
• Concerns
  • Bias in sample selection
  • Bias in self-selecting respondents
  • No statistical significance
  • Open-ended questions are difficult to analyze
  • Leading questions
  • Appropriation
  • Vague questions

Group Elicitation Approaches

• Categories
  • Focus Groups
  • Brainstorming
• Advantages
  • Better communication than formal interview
  • Can gauge reaction to stimulus materials
• Disadvantages
  • Can create unnatural groups
  • Danger of Groupthink
  • May only provide superficial responses to technical questions
  • Requires a highly trained facilitator
• Concerns
  • Sample bias
  • Dominance and submission

Joint/Rapid Application Development Principals

• Group dynamics
• Visual aids
• Organized, rational process
• WYSIWYG documentation method

Participant Observation Technique

• Approach applications
• Advantages
  • Contextualized
  • Reveals details that other methods cannot
• Disadvantages
  • Extremely time consuming
  • Resulting “rich picture” is hard to analyze
  • Cannot say much about the results of proposed changes

Elicitation Models

• Waterfall model
• Spiral model
• Agile model
• Using multiple models

Capability Scope Components

• Purpose
• Value proposition
• Objectives/goals
• Sponsor
• Customers
• Scope of project
• Out-of-scope
• Interfacing
• Major milestones
• Dates
• Critical assumptions
• Risks
• Issues
• Constraints
• Success criteria

Elicitation Best Practices

• Use your interpersonal skills
• Always think broadly
• Be prepared
• Determine and manage stakeholders
• Identify the root cause of the problem
• Define the capability scope
• Extract and elicit requirements from all the available sources
• Categorize the type of documents and requirements
• Model the requirements for validation
• Rank the requirements based on their importance
• Obtain final agreement from contributing stakeholders
• Document the requirements for final approval

Eliciting, Collecting and Developing Requirements Workshops