Trawling for Business Requirements:
· Formality Guide:
o
Rabbit: need to understand the work as its
currently is, as well as what the work to be. Likely to visit the current work
in small slices and then proceed to find its essence and ultimately its
solution
o
Horse: due to their large number of
stakeholders, probably make more extensive use of apprenticing, interviewing,
and use case workshops
o
Elephant: due to their large number of
stakeholders, need to document their findings as they go about trawling for
their requirements.
· Current situation:
o
Look to provide an understanding
o
Remember- when modeling “as is” situation, there
will be areas that will be out of scope
o
Technology is stripped away to give a cleaner
picture of the business
o
Documentation should be kept in the project
history
· The business analyst:
o
Observe and learn the work, and understand it
from the point of view of the owner
o
Interpret the work
o
Record the results in the form of
stakeholder-understandable analysis models
· The Brown Cow Model:
o This
brings us above the line to What-Now. This abstract view shows the real
business policy, or as we prefer to call it, the essence of the work
o
The upper-right quadrant, we get to the
Future-What view. This view shows the business as your owner wants to have it,
but still without the technology that might be used to implement that business
o This
technique (How-Now) is also used when the current users struggle to give you an
idea of how the work fits together. It is also useful when you know that there
will be a significant legacy from the existing work
o The last
quadrant, the lower right, is Future-How. Here you take your idealized view of
the future business policy and augment it with the technology and people needed
to bring it into the real world.
·
Apprenticing:
o Observe
and possibly do the work
o Ask lots
of questions
o Answers
will generate more questions
o May need
input from a few users
·
BUC Workshops:
o The
desired outcome for the BUC
o A normal
case scenario that describes the work done by the BUC
o Exception
scenarios describing what can go wrong and what the work does to correct them
(these can be postponed until later if desired)
o The
business rules applicable to the business use case
o Sketched
prototypes used to help stakeholders visualize the business use case – these
throwaway sketches are optional and are not intended to be kept beyond that
requirements phase
·
Interviewing the stakeholders:
o Set the
interview in context
o Limit the
duration of the interview to the time stated in the agenda
o Have
business use cases serve as an anchor for the interview
o Ask a
question, listen to the answer, and then feed back your understanding
o Draw
models and encourage the user to change them. Plenty of models (eg, data flow
diagrams, activity diagrams, sequence diagrams) are available to help you
communicate your understanding of a process
o Use the
stakeholder’s terminology and artifacts, both conceptual and real.
o Keep
samples or copies of artifacts and log them for future reference. Artifacts are
the things the stakeholders use in their daily work.
o Thank the
stakeholders for their time and tell them what you learned and why it was valuable
·
Asking right questions:
o The Brown
Cow viewpoints help BA explore the business use case as it is now, its essence,
and what it might be in the future.
o The BA
used a lot of questions. These begins with “What”, “How” , “When”, “Where”,
“Why” or “Who”, and they encourage the interviewee to give a detailed answer
rather than a “Yes” or “No” answer.
·
Listening to the Answers:
o Being able
to understand someone else’s meaning behind the words that they are using
o If you
want to improve your listening skill, you should repeat back some of their
words or phrases exactly as you heard them
·
Tools and techniques to generate requirements:
o Reusable
requirement: does what has been
documented before applying to the current setting
o Quick and
dirty process modeling: is a technique for building quick models of business
processes to gain understanding and consensus about the current work. This
technique is useful when much of the legacy system is to be replaced. It can
also be used when the stakeholders are geographically dispersed.
o Prototypes
and Sketches: can be effective techniques for eliciting requirements. The basic
idea is to sketch some proposed product, and then reserve engineer the
requirements from the sketch.
·
Mind
maps:
o Is a
combination of drawing and text that attempts to represent information in the
same way as your brain does. The mind map imitates your brain storage mechanism
by using links between the words and pictures that represent the information.
o Are useful
devices for organizing your thoughts. You can see the result of your thinking
in one diagram, you get an overview and details at the same time
o The mind
map provides enough information- shown as keywords and links between those
keywords.
·
The Murder Book:
o The
technique is very simple: add every document, interview note, model, mind map,
user story, and paper prototype. The murder book provides a trail of the story
of the development.
·
Video and Photographs:
o Is a way
of capturing some moments in time that you can study them later
o It is a
particularly useful technique if you want to show the current work to people
who cannot visit the stakeholder’s workplace
o We also
can take a photo of whiteboards- to show the progression of ideas – and find
that we often refer back to these images and include some of them in documents
o Are
especially useful tools for distributed teams
·
Wikis, Blogs, Discussion Forums:
o People are
happy to spend a little time (sometimes a lot of time) recording their opinions
and knowledge
o The point
is largely that anyone can do it- can make a post or edit or add to whatever
has already been posted.
·
Document Archeology:
o Is a
technique of searching though existing reports and files for underlying
requirements
o It is best
used when you have some existing or legacy system, and plan on modifying or
renewing it
·
Family Therapy:
o Do not set
out to make people agree. Instead, they aim to make it possible for people to
hear and get an understanding of other individual positions
o Is a rich
source of ideas about how to work effectively with a diverse group of people
o Use ideas
from family therapy as a way of helping us to listen to stakeholders and of
providing a feedback loop to help avoid misinterpretations
·
Best trawling technique:
o Always use
techniques with which you and your stakeholders are comfortable. The best
results come when you and the people you are dealing with feel at ease with
they way you are working together to discover requirements.
