Business Requirement Gathering - Chapter 5: Trawling for Business Requirements

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.