When gathering or analyzing requirements, it is just as important to focus on the process that you are using to develop your requirements as it is to focus on the requirements themselves.

If your requirements elicitation or management process is a poor one, you risk not understanding the business problem you are trying to solve and turning out a poor product. The cost of Information Technology (IT) project failures has become too great to ignore the fact that business analysts need to invest time to understand what they intend to build before implementation.

The good news is that a lot of thought has been put into the process of gathering and creating good requirements.

These thoughts have been gathered and structured into a discipline called Requirements Engineering.

Unfortunately, most business analysts don’t get to benefit from all of this great information on Requirements Engineering.
In most companies, requirements methodology is an afterthought or a process imposed by the higher-ups.
In between chasing down your stakeholders for interviews, wrestling with your use cases and models, and managing conflict and company politics, you don’t have time to slog through what may seem to be meaningless meetings and paperwork.

What you may not know is that the reason you’re chasing down stakeholders and having so much trouble gathering requirements effectively is that you don’t have an effective Requirements Engineering framework in place. And unless you break the cycle by doing research on what works and what doesn’t work in requirements analysis … the cycle of difficulty and ineffectiveness is guaranteed to continue.

If your company does not have a Requirements Engineering framework established within your team, you can do your manager a good turn by implementing one for your team. The fact that you do this certainly can’t hurt during your end of year performance review

Basically, Requirements Engineering encompasses all the activities and deliverables associated with defining a product’s requirements.

Think of Requirements Engineering as the software development methodology applied only to requirements.
Requirements engineering includes requirements development and requirements management.

Requirements Development encompasses the activities and deliverables for Eliciting, Analyzing, Specifying and Validating requirements.

Requirements Management encompasses activities and deliverables for Establishing Requirements Baselines, Change Control and Tracing Requirements.

Having a requirements engineering framework for your team will help you define:

1. Which member of your team is performing what requirements activity

2. When a requirements activity will take place

3. What the details and steps of each activity is

Having all of this formally defined will help your team reach its goal. Having a good process in place has been shown to have a significant effect on a business analysis team’s ability to develop correct requirements on time and within budget.

The best Requirements Engineering process to follow will be the one that makes your team the most productive and that produces excellent (correct, complete, clear, concise, consistent, relevant, feasible and verifiable) requirements.

You will only discover your team’s best way by understanding Requirements Engineering and developing a framework that suits your kind of projects, your environmental constraints and company culture.

If you are unable to work the process, it is unlikely that you can create a good product. Add the knowledge of Requirements Engineering to your belt and it can only help make you a better business analyst.

Requirements Engineering is one of the several courses taught at the Business Analyst Boot Camp Training.

Traditional Business Analysis Training tends to be expensive because you have to pay for each core business analysis course like UML Training or Use Case Training or Requirements Engineering Training.

In addition, you have to register and pay for several classes just to get trained on one course. So, you end up paying for an “Introduction to Use Case” Class and an “Advanced Use Clase” class etc. just to get a complete A – Z “Use Case” Training.

What if you could get all the “Use Case Training” you need by attending one class? What if you could get all the Business Analyst Training you need in a few weeks instead of several years or forever … would you take the training?

About The Author

My name is Kingsley Tagbo and I am a technical expert living in Saint Louis, Missouri.

I develop training, coaching, mentoring and personal development programs for business analysts, computer programmers, testers, project managers, web designers, data analysts, report writers, software developers and other information technology professionals working in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore, Japan and New Zealand.

If you are in need of Technical Training … Register For Live, Hands-On, Instructor-Led, Online Video Training At The Business Analyst Boot Camp or Software Developer Boot Camp or Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) Boot Camp.

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