Requirements-Related Resources By Dan Tasker

Articles and Posts FEATURED Jan 01, 2022 10 mins 4593 Views 0 Comments 1 Likes

My thanks to Requirements.com for hosting this web page - allowing me to consolidate links to articles and other resources I’ve produced during the final 10 years of my 50-year career in information technology. The objective is to inform business analysts who have found items I’ve published useful of additional items that may be of benefit.

Links are categorized as follows:

Article Series (2)
Stand-Alone Articles (5)
Case Studies (1 of 2)
Webinars (3)
Templates (9)

Article Series

Requirements In Context – A major update the similarly-named series published in 2016 at BATimes.com. The earlier series included random requirement examples and the suggestion that templates be used. This updated version utilises a comprehensive end-to-end set of example requirements presented in the Trips-R-You case study - documented utilizing a set of spreadsheet-based templates.

Part 1 - Just Know it! – Introduces the series and defines its primary context as functional requirements for business information systems.

Part 2 - The Functional View from 10,000 feet - describes a generic model of functions applicable to any organization.

Part 3 – Scope = High-Level Requirements - looks at scoping a project that involves an information system as part of the solution to be delivered.

Part 4 – Keeping High-Level Requirements High Level - introduces five fundamental capability types that can be provided by an information system.

Part 5 – Managing Data-Specific Business Needs Using a Data Dictionary – discusses capturing data-specific needs as part of, but separate from, detailed functional requirements.

Part 6 – Detailed Requirements for User Interfaces and Reports - discusses the two capability types that involve data recognizable by humans.

Part 7 – Detailed Requirements for Data Importing and Exporting - addresses business needs involving machine-readable data being sourced or reported by the information system.

Part 8 – Detailed Requirements for Automated Functionality - discusses the business need for the information system to manipulate data it has access to for the purpose of updating or creating new data.

Part 9 – Tool Support for Managing Requirements [in Context] - discusses extending commercially-available requirements and application life cycle management tools to handle structured requirement detail examples presented in the series.

Information System Data Fundamentals – A major update to the Well-Defined Data series originally published in 2018 at BATimes.com. This updated version takes advantage of the data dictionary spreadsheet-based template developed in conjunction with the Trips-R-You case study and described in Part 5 of the updated Requirements In Context series.

Part 1 – Series Introduction - Includes definitions of the terms Information System, Record, and Field used throughout the series.

Part 2 – Organization-Independent Records – discusses records such as GL ACCOUNT, STAFF MEMBER, and ASSET. These types of records are well-understood within any organization large enough to warrant information systems supporting Accounting, Human Resources, or Asset Management functions.

Part 3 – Line-of-Business-Specific Records – discusses four fundamental data concepts associated with an organization’s line(s) of business: Products, Customers, Sales, and sale-related Locations.

Part 4 – Product, Customer, Sale, and Location Records - discusses record types supporting the concepts product, customer, sale, and location. The names given to these records varies depending on the line(s) of business an organization is in and its sales processes.

Part 5 – Identification Fields – discusses record business identifiers. Their purpose is to uniquely identify an instance of a record. Users of an information system are expected to have knowledge of, or access to, this value.

Part 6 – Name Fields – discusses fields intended to contain a user-recognizable value by which a person or thing is known, addressed, or referred to.

Part 7 – Quantity Fields – discusses fields intended to satisfy the need to say something quantitative about a record. A quantity field requires particular attention be paid to its unit of measure and precision.

Part 8 – Classification Fields - allows the recording of a meaningful fact about a record instance, with that fact drawn from a pre-established set of values. The organization may be interested in just the values, or there may be additional information about each value that the system needs to manage.

Part 9 – Point-In-Time Fields - supports a business need for an information system to know when an event took place (or will take place). Date, Time, and Date/Time field values represent a quantity of time involving a specific unit of measure and precision.

Part 10 – Record Navigation Fields - These fields do not themselves contain business data, but support an information system’s ability to navigate from a given record instance to business data in related record instances.

Stand-Alone Articles

4 Levels of User Stories for Information Systems – Intended to help business analysts capture functional requirements for an information system as User Stories. It presents, for each level, the stakeholders involved, story refinement objectives, and an end-to-end user story example.

Business Rules, Seriously? – presents five fundamental points about business rules applicable to business analysts that focus specifically on the task of defining business rules for an organization – separate from functional requirements for an information system.

How to Create a ‘Less is More’ Stakeholder-Friendly Data Model in Minutes - describes an easy-to-create, simple-to-understand, view data model. The view is of just those records involved in an information system capability supporting a specific business activity.

What’s In A BABOK Name? – discusses issues with the terms Business, Stakeholder, and Solution for requirement categories defined in the IIBA BABOK Version 3. Provides rationale for using the terms High-Level and Detailed requirements with stakeholders during requirement elicitation.

Product Requirements – Three Scenarios - discusses three fundamental scenarios a BA might face when asked to document product requirements for such an information system.

The Magic Behind Functional Requirements – Data! – presents techniques for eliciting functional requirement details based on the data the information system is dealing with during a given business activity.

Fundamentals of Non-Functional (Quality) Requirements in 1 Easy Lesson - The objective of this article is to help business analysts deal with the task of eliciting and documenting non-functional requirements (NFRs) - also known as Quality Requirements. It describes NFR fundamentals in terms of who, what, when, where, and why.

Case Studies

Trips-R-You Web-Based Flight Booking Case Study - A pseudo case study acting as a context for an end-to-end example high-level and detailed requirements elicited as part of an information system delivery project.

Yourville Library Case Study (no link available) – A pseudo case study intended as an extension to the IIBA BABOK Version 3 as a context for presenting an end-to-end set of examples of Business, Stakeholder, and Solution requirements. Examples were produced as part of a volunteer project initiated by the IIBA. Unfortunately, at the end of the project the IIBA decided not to publish the results. My request to be allowed to publish the examples I’d contributed to the project was denied.

Webinars

In 2021 I was invited by ModernAnalyst.com to present a series of webinars based on my Requirements In Context (RIC) article series. The material in that series was condensed into three one-hour webinars available OnDemand using the following links:

Keeping High-Level Requirements High-Level – Based on RIC series Parts 1, 2, 3, & 4

Minimum Detail Requirements, Maximum Requirement Detail – Based on RIC series Parts 6, 7, & 8

Guaranteed Requirement Reusability – Based on RIC series Parts 5 & 9.

Spreadsheet-Based Templates

HLR & Detailed Requirement Statement Examples – template shown supporting examples of high-level and detailed requirement statements from the Trips-R-You Case Study.

Record & Field Data Requirement Detail Examples - template shown supporting examples of record and field requirement detail from the Trips-R-You Case Study.

Business-Friendly Data Dictionary – The same template used to present examples of record and field requirement details from the Trips-R-You Case Study, but with those examples removed to make it available as a reusable template.

User Interface Requirement Detail Example - template shown supporting an example of functional and operational detail for a specific user interface capability from the Trips-R-You Case Study.

Report Requirement Detail Example - template shown supporting an example of functional and operational detail for a specific report capability from the Trips-R-You Case Study.

Data Import Requirement Detail Example - template shown supporting an example of functional and operational detail for a specific data import capability from the Trips-R-You Case Study.

Data Export Requirement Detail Example - template shown supporting an example of functional and operational detail for a specific data export capability from the Trips-R-You Case Study.

Automated Function Requirement Detail Example - template shown supporting an example of functional and operational detail for a specific automated function capability from the Trips-R-You Case Study.

Requirements in Context – Tool Extension Meta-Model - presents details of a meta-model that can be used to extend a commercially available Requirements Management (RM) or Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tool. The rationale for applying these extensions to such a tool is discussed in the RIC series article Part 9: Tool Support for Managing Requirements [In Context]

Dan Tasker

Dan is the author of over 30 requirements-related articles and other resources. His 45+ year career in Information Technology has involved organizations in a variety of industry sectors in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. His business analysis experience includes projects involving in-house software development, software vendor solution development, and COTS software acquisition and implementation. He continues to be passionate about quality requirements and helping business analysts produce them. He can be contacted at [email protected].