requirement elicitation & techniques
TRANSCRIPT
1.0 What is Requirement Elicitation
➢ Definition : Requirements elicitation is the practice of researching and discovering
the requirements of a system from users, customers, and other stakeholders.
➢ The practice is also sometimes referred to as "requirement gathering".
➢ No Requirement can be fully available and gets in to the hands of a Business Analyst.
It is the role & responsibility of a Business analyst to drive and extract all the
possible information from the stakeholders who would create Impact on the Project.
➢ Post extracting all the possible Data it is the skill of a Business Analyst to filter the
information which are only required and eliminating the others.
➢ Requirement elicitation is considered as one of the vital phase of the project , since
what would be the final output , how much impact it will create , how to achieve the
output and several other important factors depends mainly on this phase.
➢ To summarize the Requirement Elicitation is to thoroughly identify the business
needs, risks, and assumptions associated with any given project.
2.0 Elicitation Techniques
➢ There are mainly 4 types of Elicitation techniques. Which are listed below.
▪ Conversational Technique
▪ Collaborative Technique
▪ Cognitive Technique
▪ Observational Technique
2.1 Conversational Technique
➢ The Conversational method is also known as traditional methods or verbal method ,
typically describe the oral communication among two or more people.
➢ Conversation is an ordinary means to express requirements and ideas , via asking questions and replying to the particular questions.
➢ Its main focus is to understand the problem in detail and gather requirements for generic products.
➢ Some of the techniques which falls under this category are explained below.
2.1.1 Interview :
➢ The Business analyst will question the different Stakeholders , to produce the detail
information about the objectives of present work and related problems in the
software.
➢ Using this technique complete view of the system can be collected.
➢ Detailed information of data can be collected using this technique.
2.1.2 Survey / Questioner
➢ Surveys & Questioner are used to collect the required data and information by
unanimously from many people in a short span of time.
➢ It is very cheap in cost and large number of data can be collected but since all the
data provided are unanimous , to arrive at the complete final set of data is not
possible.
➢ However in a very short span of time , very huge amount of data can be collected
using this technique.
2.1.3 Requirement Workshop
➢ A requirements workshop can be defined as a structured and facilitated event for
getting carefully selected stakeholders together to discover, refine, prioritize,
validate and discuss requirements.
➢ A skilled facilitator usually manages workshop sessions.
➢ Some of the merits of conducting workshop are mentioned below.
• Discovering requirements
• Refining requirements
• Prioritizing requirements and
• Scoping requirements
2.1.4 Brainstorming
➢ Brainstorming combines a relaxed, informal approach to problem solving with
lateral thinking. It encourages people to come up with thoughts and ideas that can,
at first, seem a bit crazy.
➢ Some of these ideas can be crafted into original, creative solutions to a problem,
while others can spark even more ideas.
➢ Four rules of Brainstorming are, one, focus on quantity, not quality.… Two, defer
judgment.… Three, welcome far-fetched ideas.… And, finally, four, build on the ideas.
2.2 Collaborative Technique
➢ Collaborative technique is also known as synthetic methods. The Synthetic methods
integrate various communications channels , and suggests models to demonstrate
the characteristics and relationship of the system.
➢ Some of the commonly used collaborative techniques are explained below.
2.2.1 Prototyping
➢ In this technique initial visualization of the system is created which often used to
confirm system requirement.
➢ Using this stakeholders can recognize the real requirements and work flow of actual
system.
➢ It does helps in developing the newly recommended system and also helps to
understand the detailed knowledge of requirements.
2.2.2 JAD
➢ Joint Application Development is a requirement methodology in which stakeholders,
subject matter expert , software architect , developers attend the intense offsite
meetings to work out on project details and business problems.
➢ It helps in establishing the direct communication with the stakeholders.
➢ This Technique is also accommodates the rapid decisions and quickly handles
changes in requirements.
2.2.3 User Scenarios
➢ This technique is also called as Use cases. which represents functional aspects of the
system.
➢ It should specify the sequence of interaction between a system and an external
influences.
➢ During this technique different cases are to be extracted from different
stakeholders.
2.3 Cognitive Technique
➢ It is the technique which make use of present system documentation to capture
requirements.
➢ It discovers expert's acquaintance of current system and obtain requirements from
sequence of assumptions carried out for gather large information about problem
domain.
2.3.1 Document Analysis
➢ Document analysis is a technique that users existing document to collect
requirements of a current system.
➢ By understanding the current documentation significant information can be
identified .
➢ Documenting the requirement will be useful from the beginning to end of the
project as anyone from the project team can refer for their clarification.
2.3.2 Analysis Laddering
➢ In this technique requirements are gathered with the help of structure interview.
➢ The set of questions are arranged in hierarchical order, the success factor for this
approach is dependent stakeholders domain knowledge.
➢ This type of technique will not suit for complex project which has several
requirements.
2.3.3 Card Sorting
➢ In this technique participants sort the set of cards into a cluster where each card is
written with the explanation of domain entities.
➢ Card sorting helps the requirements analyst to collect requirements closer to the
thinking of the intended users.
➢ It certainly helps to identify the low and high level problems that needs to be
addressed.
2.4 Observational Technique
➢ Observational methods gather information by several human actions at the
atmosphere wherever software system.
➢ By observing the pain areas , it would be easy to determine the areas of
improvements and what is the ideal solution to implement the requirement.
2.4.1 Observation
➢ It is also known as the social analysis which collects user requirements by
investigating people performing their normal work.
➢ It is considered as costly technique , since it does involve lot of traveling in order to
observe the actual scenario.
2.4.2 Protocol Analysis
➢ The Stakeholders speak aloud while performing the tasks and the Business analyst
records stakeholder's actions in the form of video , audio & written notes.
➢ Requirement analyst make use of these recording to gather meaningful
requirements for designing any application.
➢ However it is not suitable for larger projects.