Eliciting Technical Requirements Training

Eliciting Technical Requirements Training

Eliciting Technical Requirements Training

In requirements engineering, requirements elicitation refers to the process of researching and discovering the requirements of a system from customers, users and other stakeholders.

An elicitation process is necessary before requirements can be analyzed, modeled or specified. Requirements elicitation is a part of the requirements engineering process, usually followed by analysis and specification of the requirements.

There are several ways to proceed with the elicitation process. Commonly used elicitation processes are the stakeholder meetings or interviews. For instance, an important first meeting could be between software engineers and customers where they discuss their perspective of the requirements.

The requirements elicitation process is more complicated than it may appear because there’s more involved that simply asking stakeholders what is to be accomplished, or how the system fits into the needs of a business.

Challenges that often arise during requirements elicitation include:

• Problems of volatility — Requirements change over a period of time.
• Problems of understanding — When stakeholders do not completely understand what is needed and what is possible, they may have trouble communicating with the systems engineer or omit information. Conflict with other stakeholders is also possible.
• Problems of scope — This refers to the boundary of the system being ill-defined or the stakeholders specify unnecessary technical details that tend to obfuscate overall system objectives.

Eliciting Technical Requirements Training Course Specifics

Eliciting Technical Requirements Training is a 2-day training course that provides details on how to elicit technical requirements. The stakeholders may well begin with desires, and expectations that may contain vague, ambiguous statements that are difficult to use for technical activities. Care must be taken to ensure that those desires and expectations are coalesced into a set of clear and concise need statements that are useful as a start point for system definition.

These statements then need to be further clarified and translated into more engineering-oriented language in a set of stakeholder requirements to enable proper architecture definition and requirement activities.

Target Audience

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

Training Objectives

Upon the completion of Eliciting Technical Requirements, participants can:

• Analyze the validity of previously produced project requirements
• Identify relevant stakeholders and other sources of information for each technical requirement
• Create a framework for eliciting technical requirements
• Choose appropriate tools for technical requirements collection and determine the rationale for their selection
• Elicit thorough, accurate, and traceable requirements by applying different tools
• Document the data in a requirements document based
• Gather a complete set of technical requirements based on the stakeholder goals and needs
• Conduct hard data collection
• Define the capability scope
• Apply best practices of data elicitation
• Manage the requirements throughout the project lifecycle

Course Topics

Overview of Eliciting, Collecting and Developing Technical Requirements

• Requirements Elicitation Problems
• Current Elicitation Techniques
• Data Collection and Reporting Procedures
• Collaborative Elicitation Approaches
• Elicitation Models
• Capability Scope Components
• Elicitation Best Practices

Requirements Development and Major Stakeholder Expectations

• Development of requirements
• Description of the current environment
• Stakeholders
• Feedback to Stakeholders
• Facilitation skills and techniques
• Transforming Requirements into Requirements Specifications
• How requirements specifications relate to requirements
• Requirements Flow down in Specifications
• Specification Types and Formats
• Types of requirements specification
• Specification Writing
• Review of requirements quality
• Requirement structural template

Communication Techniques for Eliciting Requirements

• Stakeholder involvement
• Defining valid and meaningful needs
• Technical reviews
• Stakeholder feedback on the needs being collected
• Prioritization of the needs
• ConOps to System Requirements Mapping (generic)

Technical Requirements Analysis

• Introduction to Requirements
• The Quality of Requirements
• Description of Requirements Writing (within the larger context of system development)
• Overview of Requirements Development
• Requirements Elicitation
• Purpose of Requirements
• Levels of Requirements
• Understanding the different levels of requirements
• Performance requirements
• Conditions (e.g., environmental, reliability and availability)
• Environmental and Non-Functional requirements
• System
• Sub system
• Component / task
• Validation of Stakeholders Needs

Classification of the Requirements

• Eight basic types
• Differences between requirements for hardware, software, services
• Functional
• Non-functional
• Performance
• Non-Requirements

Structure of a Well-Formed Requirement

• Definition
• Capabilities
• Conditions
• Constraints
• Operational Policies & Constraints
• Technical and Policy Constraints
• Properties
• Interface
• Human
• Hardware
• Software
• Communications
• Functional analysis – needs analysis, operational analysis, use cases
• Design requirements analysis
• States & Modes analysis
• Workshop – States and modes analysis
• Requirements Verification

Workshops/Exercise

• Workshop 1
  • Examples of good and poor requirements (group project)
  • Requirements constructs
  • Group presentations and discussions
• Workshop 2 – Classifying requirements as functional or design
• Workshop 3 – Writing a functionally oriented specification versus a design-oriented specification
  • Analysis of CONOPS document
  • Analysis of Requirements Development

Eliciting Technical Requirements Training