EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book Requirements Elicitation Techniques   Simply Put

Download or read book Requirements Elicitation Techniques Simply Put written by Angela Hathaway and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-07-29 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Requirement elicitation is the first step in gathering user requirements; it is the process of understanding and acquiring the business needs of all involved stakeholders. The importance of requirements elicitation cannot be overstated. The requirements you elicit and gather are the foundation for the remainder of ALL of the work on the project. This book is a continuation of our Requirements Elicitation series. The previously published "Requirements Elicitation Interviews and Workshops - Simply Put" deals with soft skills needed to elicit requirements. This book, "Requirements Elicitation Techniques - Simply Put", is all about specific techniques designed to improve the outcomes of your elicitation interviews and workshops. The presented techniques will help practicing business analysts, future business analysts, subject matter experts, managers, product owners, project managers, and anyone responsible for getting the right requirements from the right people. Many people elicit requirements in an organization under the guise of 'business analysis' although it is not in their job description. Whether you are the CEO, COO, Director, Manager, or on the front lines, you may be involved in defining how technology can benefit you and your organization. When you are in that awesome role, you are at that time "the one wearing the Business Analysis (BA) hat". So what are you going to learn? This book presents the nuts and bolts of "requirements elicitation" which will help you: Identify potential stakeholders early in the project Manage the requirements elicitation process with a Question File Recognize, track, and report progress toward requirements completion Define, document, and analyze business problems to ferret out hidden requirements Facilitate effective requirements brainstorming sessions to uncover additional requirements Use 10 critical questions to initiate the requirements elicitation process Capture and communicate assumptions about your requirements Avoid "analysis paralysis" by recognizing when it is time to stop eliciting and start deciding About the Authors Angela and Tom Hathaway have authored and delivered hundreds of training courses and publications for business analysts around the world. They have facilitated hundreds of Requirements Gathering Workshops for information technology projects under a variety of acronyms (JAD, ASAP, JADr, JRP, etc.). Based on their personal journey and experiences reported by their students, they recognized how much anyone can benefit from improving their requirements elicitation skills. Their mission is to allow anyone, anywhere access to simple, easy-to-learn techniques by sharing their experience and expertise in their training seminars, blogs, eBooks, video courses, and public presentations.

Book Requirements Elicitation Techniques     Simply Put

Download or read book Requirements Elicitation Techniques Simply Put written by Thomas and Angela Hathaway and published by BA-Experts. This book was released on 2016-07-29 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT? 7 Ways to Improve Your Requirements Elicitation Skills Getting the right requirements from the right people at the right time for your project is a critical success factor for any IT project. Nearly every study over the past 40 years has pinpointed missing and misunderstood IT requirements as the primary cause of IT project failures and overruns. “Requirements Elicitation Techniques – Simply Put!” presents 7 requirements definition techniques that evolved from our work with customers to meet that specific challenge. This book is a continuation of our Requirements Elicitation series. The previously published book “Requirements Elicitation Interviews and Workshops – Simply Put” deals with soft skills (i.e. how to run a requirements workshop) needed to elicit requirements. The book defines the concept of requirements elicitation and explains why it is necessary. It presents specific business analysis techniques for identifying stakeholders, analyzing relevant business problems, helping stakeholders discover what they need and want the solution to deliver, and a set of key questions you need answered to initiate and manage the elicitation process. Applying these techniques will significantly improve your requirements elicitation outcomes. “Requirements Elicitation Techniques – Simply Put!” will help practicing business analysts, future business analysts, subject matter experts, managers, product owners, project managers, and anyone responsible for getting the right requirements from the right people. You will learn how to: - Identify potential stakeholders - Manage the requirements elicitation process - Track progress toward requirements completion - Define and analyze business problems to ferret out hidden requirements - Facilitate effective requirements brainstorming sessions - Use 10 critical questions to initiate the WHO WILL BENEFIT FROM READING THIS BOOK? Many distinct roles or job titles in the business community perform business needs analysis for digital solutions. They include: - Product Owners - Business Analysts - Requirements Engineers - Business- and Customer-side Team Members - Agile Team Members - Subject Matter Experts (SME) - Project Leaders and Managers - Systems Analysts and Designers - AND “anyone wearing the business analysis hat”, meaning anyone responsible for defining a future digital solution TOM AND ANGELA’S (the authors) STORY Like all good IT stories, theirs started on a project many years ago. Tom was the super techie, Angela the super SME. They fought their way through the 3-year development of a new policy maintenance system for an insurance company. They vehemently disagreed on many aspects, but in the process discovered a fundamental truth about IT projects. The business community (Angela) should decide on the business needs while the technical team’s (Tom)’s job was to make the technology deliver what the business needed. Talk about a revolutionary idea! All that was left was learning how to communicate with each other without bloodshed to make the project a resounding success. Mission accomplished. They decided this epiphany was so important that the world needed to know about it. As a result, they made it their mission (and their passion) to share this ground-breaking concept with the rest of the world. To achieve that lofty goal, they married and began the mission that still defines their life. After over 30 years of living and working together 24x7x365, they are still wildly enthusiastic about helping the victims of technology learn how to ask for and get the digital (IT) solutions they need to do their jobs better. More importantly, they are more enthusiastically in love with each other than ever before!

Book Requirements Elicitation Interviews and Workshops     Simply Put

Download or read book Requirements Elicitation Interviews and Workshops Simply Put written by Thomas and Angela Hathaway and published by BA-Experts. This book was released on 2016-02-01 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT? Do You Need Requirements Interviews and Workshops? A lot of initial uncertainty at the beginning of an IT project comes from not knowing how to approach stakeholders to get their requirements. Should you interview each stakeholder individually or in groups? Whom should you interview first? What can you do to guide stakeholders to give you the information you need to formulate the right requirements? Unfortunately getting other stakeholders to express their needs and wants vis-à-vis a proposed IT solution is a non-trivial challenge. On top of that, you might be dealing with cross-functional needs which complicates the task even more. To meet that challenge, we propose that you need to hone your interpersonal skills, in particular your interviewing skills. If you have never interviewed another person before, this task alone can be intimidating. Why Should You Read This Book? Since interviewing other people for requirements is not an intuitive skill, this book presents a wide range of techniques for planning, preparing, and performing requirements elicitation interviews and workshops as well as polishing and publishing the results. It defines the characteristics of a good requirements interviewer to help you recognize areas for personal growth. To guide you through the intricacies of conducting group interviews, it includes expert advice on facilitating effective Requirements Workshops (JAD, RDW, User Story Workshops, Requirements Gathering Workshops, etc.), a powerful requirements elicitation technique for managing cross-functional group meetings on traditional and Agile software development methodologies. Specifically, this book will help you get more and better requirements by teaching you how to: - Define and distinguish five specific requirements elicitation approaches for interviewing stakeholders - Evaluate the pros and cons of each approach for your organization and project - Recognize the specific challenges and strengths of facilitated requirements workshops involving cross-functional groups of stakeholders - Select the right requirements interviewing mode - Prepare, perform, and manage effective requirements interviews and workshops - Use informational and active listening to capture hidden requirements The presented material is based on our experience gained in consulting contracts with organizations of - every size, from small businesses to multi-nationals and governments. These topics are the core of extensive instructor-led training programs we have presented to tens of thousands of people around the world. As a value add-on, many of the presented ideas are not limited to IT projects; they can improve the outcomes of all of your personal and professional endeavors. You will learn how to: - Identify potential stakeholders - Manage the requirements elicitation process - Track progress toward requirements completion - Define and analyze business problems to ferret out hidden requirements - Facilitate effective requirements brainstorming sessions - Use 10 critical questions to initiate the WHO WILL BENEFIT FROM READING THIS BOOK? Many distinct roles or job titles in the business community perform business needs analysis for digital solutions. They include: - Product Owners - Business Analysts - Requirements Engineers - Business- and Customer-side Team Members - Agile Team Members - Subject Matter Experts (SME) - Project Leaders and Managers - Systems Analysts and Designers - AND “anyone wearing the business analysis hat”, meaning anyone responsible for defining a future digital solution TOM AND ANGELA’S (the authors) STORY Like all good IT stories, theirs started on a project many years ago. Tom was the super techie, Angela the super SME. They fought their way through the 3-year development of a new policy maintenance system for an insurance company. They vehemently disagreed on many aspects, but in the process discovered a fundamental truth about IT projects. The business community (Angela) should decide on the business needs while the technical team’s (Tom)’s job was to make the technology deliver what the business needed. Talk about a revolutionary idea! All that was left was learning how to communicate with each other without bloodshed to make the project a resounding success. Mission accomplished. They decided this epiphany was so important that the world needed to know about it. As a result, they made it their mission (and their passion) to share this ground-breaking concept with the rest of the world. To achieve that lofty goal, they married and began the mission that still defines their life. After over 30 years of living and working together 24x7x365, they are still wildly enthusiastic about helping the victims of technology learn how to ask for and get the digital (IT) solutions they need to do their jobs better. More importantly, they are more enthusiastically in love with each other than ever before!

Book Requirements Elicitation Interviews and Workshops   Simply Put

Download or read book Requirements Elicitation Interviews and Workshops Simply Put written by Tom Hathaway and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-02-09 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is "requirements elicitation" and why should you care? Why should anyone read a book about requirements gathering? All you have to do to get the requirements for anything is ask everyone involved what they want it to do, right? If you are capable of understanding their answers, you should be done in a heartbeat. So, why the fuss?Based on the track record of the Information Technology (IT) profession, it appears that gathering the right requirements from the right people to define the right IT solution for any organization is nearly impossible. Industry insiders cannot even agree on what to call the process. Over the years, we have tried "Requirements Gathering", "Requirements Capture", "Requirements Definition", "Requirements Discovery", and "Requirements Elicitation". Regardless what we call it, this book will give you a head start on getting the job done right."Requirements Elicitation Interviews and Workshops - Simply Put!" deals with the "soft skills" side of life, meaning attitudes and behaviors that promote effective requirements elicitation. In particular, you can learn how to:Define and distinguish five specific requirements elicitation approaches from one-on-one Requirements Interviews to Requirements Gathering Workshops* Evaluate the pros and cons of each approach for your organization and project* Define the seven habits to successful requirements discovery* Plan and prepare Requirements Interviews* Prepare, perform, and manage effective requirements gathering Workshops * Recognize the challenges and strengths of facilitated requirements workshops with cross-functional groups* Use informational and active listening to capture hidden requirementsAbout the authorsAngela and Tom Hathaway have trained, consulted, mentored and coached thousands of business analysts around the world for organizations from small businesses to Fortune 100. Based on their combined 60+ years of experience in Information Technology and Business Analysis, they serve up a unique perspective on this burgeoning field of knowledge.

Book How to Write Effective Requirements for IT     Simply Put

Download or read book How to Write Effective Requirements for IT Simply Put written by Thomas and Angela Hathaway and published by BA-Experts. This book was released on 2016-09-03 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT? Effective Requirements Reduce Project Failures Writing requirements is one of the core competencies for anyone in an organization responsible for defining future Information Technology (IT) applications. However, nearly every independently executed root-cause analysis of IT project problems and failures in the past half-century have identified “misunderstood or incomplete requirements” as the primary cause. This has made writing requirements the bane of many projects. The real problem is the subtle differences between “understanding” someone else’s requirement and “sharing a common understanding” with the author. “How to Write Effective Requirements for IT – Simply Put!” gives you a set of 4 simple rules that will make your requirement statements more easily understood by all target audiences. The focus is to increase the “common understanding” between the author of a requirement and the solution providers (e.g., in-house or outsourced IT designers, developers, analysts, and vendors). The rules we present in this book will reduce the failure rate of projects suffering from poor requirements. Regardless of your job title or role, if you are tasked with communicating your future needs to others, this book is for you. How to Get the Most out of this Book? To maximize the learning effect, you will have optional, online exercises to assess your understanding of each presented technique. Chapter titles prefaced with the phrase “Exercise” contain a link to a web-based exercise that we have prepared to give you an opportunity to try the presented technique yourself. These exercises are optional and they do not “test” your knowledge in the conventional sense. Their purpose is to demonstrate the use of the technique more real-life than our explanations can supply. You need Internet access to perform the exercises. We hope you enjoy them and that they make it easier for you to apply the techniques in real life. Specifically, this eWorkbook will give you techniques to: - Express business and stakeholder requirements in simple, complete sentences - Write requirements that focus on the business need - Test the relevance of each requirement to ensure that it is in scope for your project - Translate business needs and wants into requirements as the primary tool for defining a future solution and setting the stage for testing - Create and maintain a question file to reduce the impact of incorrect assumptions - Minimize the risk of scope creep caused by missed requirements - Ensure that your requirements can be easily understood by all target audiences - Confirm that each audience shares a mutual understanding of the requirements - Isolate and address ambiguous words and phrases in requirements. - Use our Peer Perception technique to find words and phrases that can lead to misunderstandings. - Reduce the ambiguity of a statement by adding context and using standard terms and phrases TOM AND ANGELA’S (the authors) STORY Like all good IT stories, theirs started on a project many years ago. Tom was the super techie, Angela the super SME. They fought their way through the 3-year development of a new policy maintenance system for an insurance company. They vehemently disagreed on many aspects, but in the process discovered a fundamental truth about IT projects. The business community (Angela) should decide on the business needs while the technical team’s (Tom)’s job was to make the technology deliver what the business needed. Talk about a revolutionary idea! All that was left was learning how to communicate with each other without bloodshed to make the project a resounding success. Mission accomplished. They decided this epiphany was so important that the world needed to know about it. As a result, they made it their mission (and their passion) to share this ground-breaking concept with the rest of the world. To achieve that lofty goal, they married and began the mission that still defines their life. After over 30 years of living and working together 24x7x365, they are still wildly enthusiastic about helping the victims of technology learn how to ask for and get the digital (IT) solutions they need to do their jobs better. More importantly, they are more enthusiastically in love with each other than ever before!

Book Data Flow Diagrams     Simply Put

Download or read book Data Flow Diagrams Simply Put written by Thomas and Angela Hathaway and published by BA-Experts. This book was released on 2015-03-29 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT? Learn about Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs), Context-level DFDs, and Rigorous Physical Process Models (RPPM), what they are, why they are important, and who can use them. Use Data Flow Diagrams to Visualize Workflows An old Chinese proverb says, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” In the world of Information Technology (IT), we maintain that it may even be worth a whole lot more. For most people, it is difficult or impossible to envision a process flow, especially when someone else is describing it. Understanding current workflows, however, is critical to defining a future IT solution. Just as critical is understanding how data is created and consumed throughout the workflow. To truly understand problems inherent in a business process or workflow, you need to help the practitioners visualize what they do. Visualization lets them identify better ways of working that remove current restrictions. Data Flow Diagrams are phenomenal tools for visualization. Working with business experts, you can help them identify problems and inefficiencies they don’t even know they have. These are not people problems; they are process problems. Understanding when and how to create and use Data Flow Diagrams will help you discover and capture the requirements for improving the use of information technology. Why Should You Take this Course? In “Data Flow Diagrams – Simply Put!”, you will learn the benefits of process visualization for the business community, for the one wearing the BA hat, for those tasked with developing the solution, and ultimately for the entire organization. You will also discover how DFDs are powerful tools for recognizing and eliminating two of the major problems that haunt IT projects, namely Scope Creep and Project Overruns caused by late project change requests. This book uses a concrete business scenario to present a simple, easy-to-learn approach for creating and using Data Flow Diagrams depicting workflow and data manipulation from interviews with Subject Matter Experts. You will learn how to create a Context-Level Data Flow Diagram and explode relevant process(es) to reveal the nitty-gritty detail (i.e., individual process and data specifications) that developers need to create IT solutions that the business community needs. This book answers the following questions: - What is a Data Flow Diagram (DFD)? - What is a Rigorous Physical Process Model? - What is a Context-Level DFD? - Why should I use Data Flow Diagrams? - What symbols can I use on each type of diagram? - How can I drill down into a process? - How can I show internal processes and flows that produce the results? - What does balancing a Data Flow Diagram mean and what is the business value? - What is the most efficient approach to balancing a DFD? - What business value do process specifications offer? - How can I express detailed specifications for processes and data? - What is “metadata" and why do you need it? - What does a fully balanced DFD look like? - What value does a DFD fragment provide? - Regardless of your job title or role, if you are tasked with communicating a workflow or functional requirements to others, this book is for you. WHO WILL BENEFIT FROM READING THIS BOOK? Many distinct roles or job titles in the business community perform business needs analysis for digital solutions. They include: - Product Owners - Business Analysts - Requirements Engineers - Test Developers - Business- and Customer-side Team Members - Agile Team Members - Subject Matter Experts (SME) - Project Leaders and Managers - Systems Analysts and Designers - AND “anyone wearing the business analysis hat”, meaning anyone responsible for defining a future IT solution TOM AND ANGELA’S (the authors) STORY Like all good IT stories, theirs started on a project many years ago. Tom was the super techie, Angela the super SME. They fought their way through the 3-year development of a new policy maintenance system for an insurance company. They vehemently disagreed on many aspects, but in the process discovered a fundamental truth about IT projects. The business community (Angela) should decide on the business needs while the technical team’s (Tom)’s job was to make the technology deliver what the business needed. Talk about a revolutionary idea! All that was left was learning how to communicate with each other without bloodshed to make the project a resounding success. Mission accomplished. They decided this epiphany was so important that the world needed to know about it. As a result, they made it their mission (and their passion) to share this ground-breaking concept with the rest of the world. To achieve that lofty goal, they married and began the mission that still defines their life. After over 30 years of living and working together 24x7x365, they are still wildly enthusiastic about helping the victims of technology learn how to ask for and get the digital (IT) solutions they need to do their jobs better. More importantly, they are more enthusiastically in love with each other than ever before!

Book Writing Effective User Stories

Download or read book Writing Effective User Stories written by Thomas and Angela Hathaway and published by BA-Experts. This book was released on 2013-07-29 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT? This Book Is About the “Card” (User Story: Card, Criteria, Conversation) User Stories are a great method for expressing stakeholder requirements, whether your projects follow an Agile, Iterative, or a Waterfall methodology. They are the basis for developers to deliver a suitable information technology (IT) app or application. Well-structured user stories express a single action to achieve a specific goal from the perspective of a single role. When writing user stories, stakeholders knowledgeable about the role should focus on the business result that the IT solution will enable while leaving technology decisions up to the developers. Good user stories are relevant to the project, unambiguous, and understandable to knowledge peers. The best user stories also contain crucial non-functional (quality) requirements, which are the best weapon in the war against unsatisfactory performance in IT solutions. This book presents two common user story structures to help you ensure that your user stories have all the required components and that they express the true business need as succinctly as possible. It offers five simple rules to ensure that your user stories are the best that they can be. That, in turn, will reduce the amount of time needed in user story elaboration and discussion with the development team. This book targets business professionals who are involved with an IT project, Product Owners in charge of managing a backlog, or Business Analysts working with an Agile team. Author’s Note The term “User Story” is a relative new addition to our language and its definition is evolving. In today’s parlance, a complete User Story has three primary components, namely the “Card”, the “Conversation”, and the “Criteria”. Different roles are responsible for creating each component. The “Card” expresses a business need. A representative of the business community is responsible for expressing the business need. Historically (and for practical reasons) the “Card” is the User Story from the perspective of the business community. Since we wrote this book specifically to address that audience, we use the term “User Story” in that context throughout. The “Conversation” is an ongoing discussion between a developer responsible for creating software that meets the business need and the domain expert(s) who defined it (e.g., the original author of the “Card”). The developer initiates the “Conversation” with the domain expert(s) to define the “Criteria” and any additional information the developer needs to create the application. There is much to be written about both the “Conversation” and the “Criteria”, but neither component is dealt with in any detail in this publication. A well-written User Story (“Card”) can drastically reduce the time needed for the “Conversation”. It reduces misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and false starts, thereby paving the way for faster delivery of working software. We chose to limit the content of this publication to the “User Story” as understood by the business community to keep the book focused and address the widest possible audience. WHO WILL BENEFIT FROM READING THIS BOOK? How organizations develop and deliver working software has changed significantly in recent years. Because the change was greatest in the developer community, many books and courses justifiably target that group. There is, however, an overlooked group of people essential to the development of software-as-an-asset that have been neglected. Many distinct roles or job titles in the business community perform business needs analysis for digital solutions. They include: - Product Owners - Business Analysts - Requirements Engineers - Test Developers - Business- and Customer-side Team Members - Agile Team Members - Subject Matter Experts (SME) - Project Leaders and Managers - Systems Analysts and Designers - AND “anyone wearing the business analysis hat”, meaning anyone responsible for defining a future IT solution TOM AND ANGELA’S (the authors) STORY Like all good IT stories, theirs started on a project many years ago. Tom was the super techie, Angela the super SME. They fought their way through the 3-year development of a new policy maintenance system for an insurance company. They vehemently disagreed on many aspects, but in the process discovered a fundamental truth about IT projects. The business community (Angela) should decide on the business needs while the technical team’s (Tom)’s job was to make the technology deliver what the business needed. Talk about a revolutionary idea! All that was left was learning how to communicate with each other without bloodshed to make the project a resounding success. Mission accomplished. They decided this epiphany was so important that the world needed to know about it. As a result, they made it their mission (and their passion) to share this ground-breaking concept with the rest of the world. To achieve that lofty goal, they married and began the mission that still defines their life. After over 30 years of living and working together 24x7x365, they are still wildly enthusiastic about helping the victims of technology learn how to ask for and get the digital (IT) solutions they need to do their jobs better. More importantly, they are more enthusiastically in love with each other than ever before!

Book Discovering Requirements

Download or read book Discovering Requirements written by Ian F. Alexander and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-02-11 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is not only of practical value. It's also a lot of fun to read." Michael Jackson, The Open University. Do you need to know how to create good requirements? Discovering Requirements offers a set of simple, robust, and effective cognitive tools for building requirements. Using worked examples throughout the text, it shows you how to develop an understanding of any problem, leading to questions such as: What are you trying to achieve? Who is involved, and how? What do those people want? Do they agree? How do you envisage this working? What could go wrong? Why are you making these decisions? What are you assuming? The established author team of Ian Alexander and Ljerka Beus-Dukic answer these and related questions, using a set of complementary techniques, including stakeholder analysis, goal modelling, context modelling, storytelling and scenario modelling, identifying risks and threats, describing rationales, defining terms in a project dictionary, and prioritizing. This easy to read guide is full of carefully-checked tips and tricks. Illustrated with worked examples, checklists, summaries, keywords and exercises, this book will encourage you to move closer to the real problems you're trying to solve. Guest boxes from other experts give you additional hints for your projects. Invaluable for anyone specifying requirements including IT practitioners, engineers, developers, business analysts, test engineers, configuration managers, quality engineers and project managers. A practical sourcebook for lecturers as well as students studying software engineering who want to learn about requirements work in industry. Once you've read this book you will be ready to create good requirements!

Book Functional and Non Functional Requirements     Simply Put

Download or read book Functional and Non Functional Requirements Simply Put written by Thomas and Angela Hathaway and published by BA-Experts. This book was released on 2016-09-03 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT? Functional and Non-functional Requirements Can Make or Break Your Project Defining solution-level requirements (aka functional and non-functional requirements) is a core competency for anyone in an organization responsible for defining future Information Technology (IT) applications. In this book you will learn simple and repeatable techniques for extracting solution-level specifications from business and stakeholder requirements that are expressed in complete sentence form. My co-author, Angela, and I have used these techniques on hundreds of IT projects around the globe and we know the value each provides. Using these approaches will improve your ability to identify and document requirements at the level of detail that solution providers (vendors or developers) need to deliver the right technology for their organization. The presented techniques will work on any set of well-expressed requirement statements. However, they were specifically designed for and work best with requirement statements that follow the “Rules for Writing Effective Requirements” that we present in our book “How to Write Effective Requirements for IT – Simply Put!”. Regardless of your job title or role, if you are involved in defining future business solutions, this book will help you communicate your business needs to solution providers. It will reduce the potential for misunderstandings that undermine IT’s ability to deliver the right technology for the business. How to get the most out of this book? To maximize the learning effect, you will have optional, online exercises to assess your understanding of each presented technique. Chapter titles prefaced with the phrase “Exercise” contain a link to online exercises with immediate feedback featuring our recommended resolution and the rationale behind it. These exercises are optional and they do not “test” your knowledge in the conventional sense. Their purpose is to demonstrate the use of the technique more real-life than our explanations can supply. You need Internet access to perform the exercises. We hope you enjoy them and that they make it easier for you to apply the techniques in real life. Specifically, this eWorkbook will give you techniques to: - Decompose Business and Stakeholder Requirement Statements to identify Functional and Non-Functional Requirements - Give those responsible for designing, building, and/or buying the solution the kind of information they need to make the decisions that are right for the business - Identify Informational, Performance, and Constraining Requirements from a list of Functional Requirements - Document and manage Business, Stakeholder, Functional and Non-Functional Requirements - Capture and clarify Business Rules and External Constraints that mandate limits to the delivered solution - Develop measurable Solution Requirements that facilitate End-User Acceptance Testing WHO WILL BENEFIT FROM READING THIS BOOK? Many distinct roles or job titles in the business community perform business needs analysis for digital solutions. They include: - Product Owners - Business Analysts - Requirements Engineers - Test Developers - Business- and Customer-side Team Members - Agile Team Members - Subject Matter Experts (SME) - Project Leaders and Managers - Systems Analysts and Designers - AND “anyone wearing the business analysis hat”, meaning anyone responsible for defining a future IT solution TOM AND ANGELA’S (the authors) STORY Like all good IT stories, theirs started on a project many years ago. Tom was the super techie, Angela the super SME. They fought their way through the 3-year development of a new policy maintenance system for an insurance company. They vehemently disagreed on many aspects, but in the process discovered a fundamental truth about IT projects. The business community (Angela) should decide on the business needs while the technical team’s (Tom)’s job was to make the technology deliver what the business needed. Talk about a revolutionary idea! All that was left was learning how to communicate with each other without bloodshed to make the project a resounding success. Mission accomplished. They decided this epiphany was so important that the world needed to know about it. As a result, they made it their mission (and their passion) to share this ground-breaking concept with the rest of the world. To achieve that lofty goal, they married and began the mission that still defines their life. After over 30 years of living and working together 24x7x365, they are still wildly enthusiastic about helping the victims of technology learn how to ask for and get the digital (IT) solutions they need to do their jobs better. More importantly, they are more enthusiastically in love with each other than ever before!

Book Getting and Writing IT Requirements in a Lean and Agile World

Download or read book Getting and Writing IT Requirements in a Lean and Agile World written by Thomas and Angela Hathaway and published by BA-Experts. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT? Communicate Business Needs in an Agile (e.g. Scrum) or Lean (e.g. Kanban) Environment Problem solvers are in demand in every organization, large and small, from a Mom and Pop shop to the federal government. Increase your confidence and your value to organizations by improving your ability to analyze, extract, express, and discuss business needs in formats supported by Agile, Lean, and DevOps. The single largest challenge facing organizations around the world is how to leverage their Information Technology to gain competitive advantage. This is not about how to program the devices; it is figuring out what the devices should do. The skills needed to identify and define the best IT solutions are invaluable for every role in the organization. These skills can propel you from the mail room to the boardroom by making your organization more effective and more profitable. Whether you: - are tasked with defining business needs for a product or existing software, - need to prove that a digital solution works, - want to expand your User Story and requirements discovery toolkit, or - are interested in becoming a Business Analyst, this book presents invaluable ideas that you can steal. The future looks bright for those who embrace Lean concepts and are prepared to engage with the business community to ensure the success of Agile initiatives. WHAT YOU WILL LEARN Learn Step by Step When and How to Define Lean / Agile Requirements Agile, Lean, DevOps, and Continuous Delivery do not change the need for good business analysis. In this book, you will learn how the new software development philosophies influence the discovery, expression, and analysis of business needs. We will cover User Stories, Features, and Quality Requirements (a.k.a. Non-functional Requirements – NFR). User Story Splitting and Feature Drill-down transform business needs into technology solutions. Acceptance Tests (Scenarios, Scenario Outlines, and Examples) have become a critical part of many Lean development approaches. To support this new testing paradigm, you will also learn how to identify and optimize Scenarios, Scenario Outlines, and Examples in GIVEN-WHEN-THEN format (Gherkin) that are the bases for Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) and Behavior Driven Development (BDD). This book presents concrete approaches that take you from day one of a change initiative to the ongoing acceptance testing in a continuous delivery environment. The authors introduce novel and innovative ideas that augment tried-and-true techniques for: - discovering and capturing what your stakeholders need, - writing and refining the needs as the work progresses, and - developing scenarios to verify that the software does what it should. Approaches that proved their value in conventional settings have been redefined to ferret out and eliminate waste (a pillar of the Lean philosophy). Those approaches are fine-tuned and perfected to support the Lean and Agile movement that defines current software development. In addition, the book is chock-full of examples and exercises that allow you to confirm your understanding of the presented ideas. WHO WILL BENEFIT FROM READING THIS BOOK? How organizations develop and deliver working software has changed significantly in recent years. Because the change was greatest in the developer community, many books and courses justifiably target that group. There is, however, an overlooked group of people essential to the development of software-as-an-asset that have been neglected. Many distinct roles or job titles in the business community perform business needs analysis for digital solutions. They include: - Product Owners - Business Analysts - Requirements Engineers - Test Developers - Business- and Customer-side Team Members - Agile Team Members - Subject Matter Experts (SME) - Project Leaders and Managers - Systems Analysts and Designers - AND “anyone wearing the business analysis hat”, meaning anyone responsible for defining a future IT solution TOM AND ANGELA’S (the authors) STORY Like all good IT stories, theirs started on a project many years ago. Tom was the super techie, Angela the super SME. They fought their way through the 3-year development of a new policy maintenance system for an insurance company. They vehemently disagreed on many aspects, but in the process discovered a fundamental truth about IT projects. The business community (Angela) should decide on the business needs while the technical team’s (Tom)’s job was to make the technology deliver what the business needed. Talk about a revolutionary idea! All that was left was learning how to communicate with each other without bloodshed to make the project a resounding success. Mission accomplished. They decided this epiphany was so important that the world needed to know about it. As a result, they made it their mission (and their passion) to share this ground-breaking concept with the rest of the world. To achieve that lofty goal, they married and began the mission that still defines their life. After over 30 years of living and working together 24x7x365, they are still wildly enthusiastic about helping the victims of technology learn how to ask for and get the IT solutions they need to do their jobs better. More importantly, they are more enthusiastically in love with each other than ever before!

Book A Survey on Requirements Elicitation

Download or read book A Survey on Requirements Elicitation written by Martin Fehrenbach and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2012-07-16 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research paper from the year 1998 in the subject Computer Science - Software, grade: 0, University of Kaiserslautern, language: English, abstract: The first step during the software development, requirements engineering, is very critical because of the high effort (in time and costs) that has to be made to correct mistakes detected later that have been made in this early phase of software life-cycle. In order to support the aim of high-quality software, the goals of requirements engineering are developing a complete as possible specification, providing integrated representation formalisms and accomplishing a common agreement on the specification. The very first activity that has to be passed through is requirements elicitation. There are existing three main problems: the problem of defining the scope, the problem of understanding the users’ needs and the problem of requirements volatility over time. You can follow several heuristics and guidelines to find solutions to these problems. In addition, several techniques and methodologies have been suggested to support the process of requirements elicitation. They differ in several ways: the kind of problem they intend to solve, the methods used for achieving this aim, the kind of people involved, the level of abstraction and precision the requirements have to be formulated in. In this report, a selection of these techniques and methodologies is chosen and they are classified into a classification scheme worked out. The techniques and methodologies can coarsely be divided into four classes: interview-oriented approaches, objective and goal analysis-oriented approaches, viewpoint analysis-oriented approaches, and scenario analysis-oriented approaches. There are others that do not fit into this division, but provide nevertheless help for requirements elicitation. The developed classification scheme highlights the differences between the existing techniques. It should serve as an overview of existing techniques and methods as a guideline for analysts and developers for finding an appropriate method for problems at hand.

Book Systems Analysis and Design

Download or read book Systems Analysis and Design written by Alan Dennis and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 6th Edition of Systems Analysis and Design continues to offer a hands-on approach to SAD while focusing on the core set of skills that all analysts must possess. Building on their experience as professional systems analysts and award-winning teachers, authors Dennis, Wixom, and Roth capture the experience of developing and analyzing systems in a way that students can understand and apply. With Systems Analysis and Design, 6th Edition, students will leave the course with experience that is a rich foundation for further work as a systems analyst.

Book Business Analysis Defined

Download or read book Business Analysis Defined written by Thomas and Angela Hathaway and published by BA-Experts. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT? Business Analysis in the Real World A Buddhist proverb warns, “Be mindful of intention. Intention is the seed that creates our future.” In a very real sense, this statement expresses the reason for business analysis. This discipline is really all about choosing and defining a desired future because without intention (expressed in business analysis terms, “requirements”), no future is more or less desirable than another. In reality, every organization does some form of business analysis whether it uses the term or not. For many (especially larger organizations), it is an extremely structured, managed process while others thrive on change and only do business analysis when and as needed. The perception that business analysis is only needed to develop IT solutions is inaccurate. Actually, it is a critical component of any change initiative within an organization whether software is involved or not. Current Business Analysis Techniques and Methods The book defines how business analysis is currently practiced. The authors provide insight into this fast-growing field by distinguishing strategic, tactical, and operational business analysis. It provides surveys of what Business Analysts really do and what business analysis techniques people use most often when they are the one “wearing the BA hat”. You will learn what “requirements” really are and what different types of requirements exist. Because many requirements define future information technology (IT) solutions, the authors share their experience on how Waterfall, Iterative, Agile, and Experimental (aka “Chaotic”) Software Development methodologies impact the business analysis responsibility. Who Needs Business Analysis Skills? Although the field of Business Analysis offers great career opportunities for those seeking employment, some level of business analysis skill is essential for any adult in the business world today. Many of the techniques used in the field evolved from earlier lessons learned in systems analysis and have proven themselves to be useful in every walk of life. We have personally experienced how business analysis techniques help even in your private life. We wrote this book for everyday people in the real world to give you a basic understanding of some core business analysis methods and concepts. If this book answers some of your questions, great. If it raises more questions than it answers (implying that it piqued your curiosity), even better. If it motivates you to learn more about this emerging and fascinating topic, it has served its purpose well. WHO WILL BENEFIT FROM READING THIS BOOK? Many distinct roles or job titles in the business community perform business needs analysis for digital solutions. They include: - Product Owners - Business Analysts - Requirements Engineers - Test Developers - Business- and Customer-side Team Members - Agile Team Members - Subject Matter Experts (SME) - Project Leaders and Managers - Systems Analysts and Designers - AND “anyone wearing the business analysis hat”, meaning anyone responsible for defining a future digital solution TOM AND ANGELA’S (the authors) STORY Like all good IT stories, theirs started on a project many years ago. Tom was the super techie, Angela the super SME. They fought their way through the 3-year development of a new policy maintenance system for an insurance company. They vehemently disagreed on many aspects, but in the process discovered a fundamental truth about IT projects. The business community (Angela) should decide on the business needs while the technical team’s (Tom)’s job was to make the technology deliver what the business needed. Talk about a revolutionary idea! All that was left was learning how to communicate with each other without bloodshed to make the project a resounding success. Mission accomplished. They decided this epiphany was so important that the world needed to know about it. As a result, they made it their mission (and their passion) to share this ground-breaking concept with the rest of the world. To achieve that lofty goal, they married and began the mission that still defines their life. After over 30 years of living and working together 24x7x365, they are still wildly enthusiastic about helping the victims of technology learn how to ask for and get the digital (IT) solutions they need to do their jobs better. More importantly, they are more enthusiastically in love with each other than ever before!

Book Just Enough Requirements Management

Download or read book Just Enough Requirements Management written by Alan Davis and published by Addison-Wesley. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the digital version of the printed book (Copyright © 2005). If you develop software without understanding the requirements, you're wasting your time. On the other hand, if a project spends too much time trying to understand the requirements, it will end up late and/or over-budget. And products that are created by such projects can be just as unsuccessful as those that fail to meet the basic requirements. Instead, every company must make a reasonable trade-off between what's required and what time and resources are available. Finding the right balance for your project may depend on many factors, including the corporate culture, the time-to-market pressure, and the criticality of the application. That is why requirements management—gathering requirements, identifying the "right" ones to satisfy, and documenting them—is essential. Just Enough Requirements Management shows you how to discover, prune, and document requirements when you are subjected to tight schedule constraints. You'll apply just enough process to minimize risks while still achieving desired outcomes. You'll determine how many requirements are just enough to satisfy your customers while still meeting your goals for schedule, budget, and resources. If your project has insufficient resources to satisfy all the requirements of your customers, you must read Just Enough Requirements Management.

Book Advanced Intelligent Systems for Sustainable Development  AI2SD   2020

Download or read book Advanced Intelligent Systems for Sustainable Development AI2SD 2020 written by Janusz Kacprzyk and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-02-07 with total page 1173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book publishes the best papers accepted and presented at the 3rd edition of the International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Systems for Sustainable Development Applied to Agriculture, Energy, Health, Environment, Industry, Education, Economy, and Security (AI2SD’2020). This conference is one of the biggest amalgamations of eminent researchers, students, and delegates from both academia and industry where the collaborators have an interactive access to emerging technology and approaches globally. In this book, readers find the latest ideas addressing technological issues relevant to all areas of the social and human sciences for sustainable development. Due to the nature of the conference with its focus on innovative ideas and developments, the book provides the ideal scientific and brings together very high-quality chapters written by eminent researchers from different disciplines, to discover the most recent developments in scientific research.

Book Instant Approach to Software Testing

Download or read book Instant Approach to Software Testing written by Dr Anand Nayyar and published by BPB Publications. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One-stop Guide to software testing types, software errors, and planning process DESCRIPTION Software testing is conducted to assist testers with information to improvise the quality of the product under testing. The book primarily aims to present testing concepts, principles, practices, methods cum approaches used in practice. The book will help the readers to learn and detect faults in software before delivering it to the end user. The book is a judicious mix of software testing concepts, principles, methodologies, and tools to undertake a professional course in software testing. The book will be a useful resource for students, academicians, industry experts, and software architects to learn artefacts of testing. Ê Book discuss the foundation and primary aspects connected to the world of software testing, then it discusses the levels, types and terminologies associated with software testing. In the further chapters it will gives a comprehensive overview of software errors faced in software testing as well as various techniques for error detection, then the test case development and security testing. In the last section of the bookÊ discusses the defect tracking, test reports, software automation testing using the Selenium tool and then ISO/IEEE-based software testing standards. KEY FEATURESÊ Presents a comprehensive investigation about the software testing approach in terms of techniques, tools and standards Highlights test case development and defect tracking In-depth coverage of test reports development Covers the Selenium testing tool in detail Comprehensively covers IEEE/ISO/IEC software testing standards WHAT WILL YOU LEARN With this book, the readers will be able to learn: Taxonomy, principles and concepts connected to software testing. Software errors, defect tracking, and the entire testing process to create quality products. Generate test cases and reports for detecting errors, bugs, and faults. Automation testing using the Selenium testing tool. Software testing standards as per IEEE/ISO/IEC to conduct standard and quality testing. Ê WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR The readers should have a basic understanding of software engineering concepts, object-oriented programming and basic programming fundamentals. Ê Ê Table of Contents 1. Introduction to Software Testing 2. Software Testing Levels, Types, Terms, and Definitions 3. Software Errors 4. Test Planning Process (According to IEEE standard 829) 5. Test Case Development 6. Defect Tracking 7. Types of Test Reports 8. Software Test Automation 9. Understanding the Software Testing Standards

Book Requirements Development Guidebook

    Book Details:
  • Author : Dahlia Biazid
  • Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
  • Release : 2016-03-21
  • ISBN : 9781530376742
  • Pages : 156 pages

Download or read book Requirements Development Guidebook written by Dahlia Biazid and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-03-21 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "How do I know I covered all the requirements? Where do I begin? When should I stop? Did I miss something that will result in unpleasant surprises down the road?" If you are a Business Analyst, these questions will certainly mean something to you. You've probably asked yourself these questions at one point or another when you were assigned your early requirements development tasks.In this book, I introduce a requirements development roadmap that will guide you from start to finish. It is a plan carefully prepared and organized around consecutive stations. At each station, I tell you:1. The target objective, and why you need to think about that particular objective at that specific point in time2. Which elicitation techniques will best serve the objective, and which questions to ask in order to capture the information you need3. Which analysis tools to apply in order to analyze the information from different angles4. How to document the output of the exercise that you just performed