From the category archives:

Requirements Elicitation

Requirements elicitation is a core business analyst competency that involves discovering real stakeholder needs and problems. Business analysts use multiple techniques to elicit requirements, ensuring they have discovered each requirement.

Why I may never adopt the practice of “just-in-time requirements”

by Adriana Beal on January 26, 2012 · 17 comments

in Agile BA Practices,Requirements Analysis,Requirements Elicitation

The agile movement promotes positive change when it encourages teams to work together to create products that are fit for purpose with as little non-value-added activities as possible. Agile approaches embrace mechanisms for continuous improvement, and include practices that can be traced to Lean thinking, a management philosophy that aims to identify what creates value [...]

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BA Stories: Let Your Stakeholders Know You Heard Them (BABOK 3.3, 3.4)

by Laura Brandenburg on January 16, 2012 · 6 comments

in BA Stories,Requirements Elicitation

While we’ve already talked about the importance of Preparing for Elicitation and Conducting Elicitation Activities, it’s not enough to stop there. The next two (and IMHO, critical) tasks in the Elicitation Knowledge area are Document Elicitation Results and Confirm Elicitation Results. The purpose of Document Elicitation Results is to: Record the information provided by stakeholders for [...]

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User Stories: Not Just Agile Anymore

by Steven A Jones on December 28, 2011 · 9 comments

in Agile BA Practices,Requirements Analysis,Requirements Elicitation

The User Story:  simple and elegant. “As a ______, I want to _________, so that I can __________.” Why must a user story only be used for Agile projects?  I was at a seminar recently where the speaker kept talking about user stories only in the context of an agile project.  Is there a thought [...]

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Help a BA! How much detail should we go through in a requirements review meeting?

by Warren Abrey on November 30, 2011 · 3 comments

in Help a BA,Requirements Elicitation

A reader asks: How much is too much information to go over with the users? Would you go over technical details with users in a requirements meeting? Such as, if there were additional requirements pertaining to a technical implementation of updating mail server, changing AD roles/groups retrieved etc… I would think this would be overkill, but [...]

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Elicitation in the Dark: Finding Your Way to Success in a New Domain

by Jeff Steinke on November 17, 2011 · 7 comments

in Effective Meetings,Requirements Elicitation

With the travel itinerary laid out before me, I could see I had a long schedule ahead to get to the project site: three flights, two layovers, one overnight leg, and a 9am requirements elicitation meeting to welcome me first thing the next morning. That was not what worried me though; this was Day 1 [...]

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BA Stories: Do You Have a Favorite Elicitation Activity? (BABOK 5.2)

by Laura Brandenburg on October 24, 2011 · 10 comments

in BA Stories,Requirements Elicitation

One thing that surprised me as I leveraged the structure of the BABOK to analyze my own BA career experiences is that I tended to rely on some “tried and true” ways to elicit requirements. This was definitely an area where, although I felt very confident in the results I could achieve, I could do for [...]

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BA Stories: Getting Elicitation Right – With Preparation (BABOK 3.1)

by Laura Brandenburg on October 17, 2011 · 31 comments

in BA Stories,Requirements Elicitation

It’s difficult to even think about being a business analyst without elicitation. Yet, it’s so core, it’s often difficult to abstract from the other BA tasks as well. It seems we are almost always eliciting something – the business need, the solution requirements, our stakeholder’s concerns, assumptions and constraints, etc. While some elicitation will, by [...]

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Help A BA! How do I extract business rules from legacy systems?

by AaronWhittenberger on August 31, 2011 · 6 comments

in Help a BA,Requirements Analysis,Requirements Elicitation

We have two readers ask similar questions of our Help A BA! staff concerning extracting business rules from legacy systems; so let’s help them both out. Reader 1: As rules are mostly hardcoded and code walkthrough is too time consuming in mainframe systems, what is the best way to extract business rules from legacy systems [...]

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Laura’s CBAP Journey: Settling into a Study Rhythm (Weeks 6/7)

by Laura Brandenburg on August 24, 2011 · 7 comments

in CBAP,Requirements Elicitation

This journey has had its ups and downs. Like any new venture, it started with buoyancy – or maybe better, that feeling you get when you are heading up the first big hill of a roller coaster. You know you are in for a crazy ride, but right now it just feels good to have [...]

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We are all part of the conversation, from inception to design and beyond

by Adriana Beal on August 10, 2011 · 4 comments

in Engaging the Business,Requirements Analysis,Requirements Elicitation,Requirements Validation

In my last post, Help a BA! How do I get stakeholders to focus on business requirements?, I wrote: As discussed above, it’s not only OK, but expected that the business side will be involved in defining the solution that will be built to address a business problem or opportunity. The solution requirements, which describe [...]

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