Latest Requirements Buzz

Getting Your Requirements Right: Collaborate With Stakeholders To Work Smarter
Given the economic downturn, "cheaper, better, faster" seems to be a universal mantra in business. To stay competitive, organizations must continually strive to be more agile and develop higher-quality solutions more quickly-despite obstacles such as geographically distributed teams, limited budgets and resources, quick delivery times, language barriers and government regulations. These challenges require teams to consider new ways of doing business so they can be more responsive to frequent business changes. One area that businesses can optimize is their software development processes. If th...

The Path to Requirements Elicitation
The path to requirements elicitation is something that analysts are rarely taught. Everyone knows that it involves interviews and research, but within most organizations, exactly how the interviews and research should be conducted is nebulous.

Call for Papers: Requirements Engineering Education and Training
The 4th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering Education and Training (REET09) Held in conjunction with the 17th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE09). The workshop will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA on August 31, 2009.  

The Problem With Defining Information Requirements
As many of you know, I have been active in the Information Technology (IT) industry for a long time now. It's a strange business and, frankly, sometimes I wish I had never gotten involved with it. Nonetheless, there are a lot of problems associated with IT, such as computer performance, capacity planning, security, networking, disaster recovery, but probably the biggest problem is requirements definition. In other words, accurately defining the information needs of the end-user. The industry is actually quite good at designing and writing software, developing data bases, and acquiring hardware...

Creating a Software Requirements Document
 In order to successfully evaluate and select a packaged software application you must first clearly identify the functionality that you are looking for in the product. A Software Requirements Document specifically identifies and documents the overall business purpose for the software and includes a more detailed listing of the functional modules, and the general and technology requirements for the software.

Requirements Visualization: A New Trend?


Requirements Gathering - Scheduling Activities
Requirements gathering activities should be scheduled by your project plan like any other project related activities. If these activities don't track to the schedule, whether because the schedule isn't feasible or some other reason, it will cause all the dependant activities to slip. Once you've chosen your requirements gathering approach and the stakeholders you'll meet with to gather the requirements, you can schedule the meetings, or interviews, or other methods for soliciting the requirements.

Writing Flexible Requirements for Future Development
For almost every analyst, the day comes when you write a set of requirements that causes engineers to bemoan a recent development project that they just coded. "If only we'd known that you wanted to build this, we would have made the last project more flexible. Now we've hardcoded in changes that will take days to rebuild."

The Problem With Defining Information Requirements
There are a lot of problems associated with IT, such as computer performance, capacity planning, security, networking, disaster recovery, but probably the biggest problem is requirements definition. In other words, accurately defining the information needs of the end-user.

Identifying the Right Stakeholders to Contribute to Requirements
Your first step in the requirements gathering process should be to solicit requirements for your software development project from the stakeholders. The method and techniques you choose to employ for the purpose of requirements solicitation will require you to contact these stakeholders for the purpose of either gathering them together, meeting with them one on one, or communicating with them long distance. That first contact will require a contact list of key stakeholders.