Software Requirements

These items are available for downloading at the companion content website for this book:

http://aka.ms/SoftwareReq3E/files

You’re never going to get perfect requirements. From a practical point of view, the goal of requirements development is to accumulate a shared understanding of requirements that is good enough to allow construction of the next portion of the product—be that 1 percent or 100 percent of the entire product—to proceed at an acceptable level of risk. The major risk is that of having to do excessive unplanned rework because the team didn’t sufficiently understand the requirements for the next chunk of work before starting design and construction.

errors that have been reported since this book was published are listed on our Microsoft Press site at oreilly.com:

http://aka.ms/SoftwareReq3E/errata

As consultant Nanette Brown put it, “Even in an agile environment the concept of sign-off can fill a valid function. Agile tells us to ‘embrace change,’ but the concept of change only exists with respect to a reference point. Even within a team where there is close communication, people can have different interpretations of current plans and status. One person’s ‘change’ can be what another person thought was already agreed to. However, if you position a sign-off as a lightweight ceremony acknowledging that ‘We are Here’ I think it’s fine. Just because ‘We are Here’ today doesn’t mean we can’t be somewhere else tomorrow, but at least it ensures a common understanding and point of reference.”

The analyst steers the project participants toward a requirements agreement that leads to a win-win-win outcome in the following ways:
Customers are delighted with the product.
The developing organization is happy with the business outcomes.
All team members are proud of the good work they did on a challenging and rewarding project.

They need to critically evaluate the information to reconcile conflicts, separate user “wants” from the underlying true needs, and distinguish solution ideas from requirements.

An effective BA combines strong communication, facilitation, and interpersonal skills with technical and business domain knowledge and the right personality for the job. Patience and a genuine desire to work with people are key success factors.

A business analyst enables change in an organizational context by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders.

The vision and scope document contains the product’s business requirements. The vision statement gives all stakeholders a common understanding of the product’s outcome. The scope defines the boundary between what’s in and what’s out for a specific release or iteration.

A customer is an individual or organization that derives either direct or indirect benefit from a product. Software customers could request, pay for, select, specify, use, or receive the output generated by a software product.