Techniques for Gathering Requirements

Posted by Mike Ramm on January 29, 2008

I found recently an article called 10 techniques for gathering requirements. While Tom Mochal is a very competent expert and I admire his opinion a lot, some of the techniques he describes look too trivial - one-on-one interview, group interview, facilitated session - they are pretty much obvious.

More interesting to me were some techniques which I find very efficient but seemingly more rarely used. So I decided to take a closer look on them and to analyze them in more details.

Following people around (Observation). It happens very often a customer to come to us with their vision about how the new product should look like and what it should do without being able to explain what exactly is the business process running in their company or how it is going to change with the deployment of the new software solution. One of the most effective approaches to study the customer’s business process and the habits and the technical skills of the future end users is just to stay there and observe their daily activities. Observation gives us the ability to see some flaws in their work, some too complex or unnecessary activities that could be eliminated or to get some ideas to improve the process and thus to increase the customer’s profit from implementing the new software solution. It is much better if our business analysts have the ability to the actual work the users do to get a hands-on feel for the real situation.
Unfortunately, we are often pressed by tight deadlines especially in the analysis phase (which is a big mistake!) and we rarely use this technique for gathering information.
Sometimes, the customer doesn’t allow us to meet their employees using security arguments. In those cases we should strongly emphasize that this is a risk for the right understanding of the requirements and for the successful release of the project.