Articles
Asking Open-Ended Questions
Getting the important business needs out of the requirements gathering process should be the goal of every business analyst. In this article, Karl Wiegers discusses the benefits of asking open-ended questions during requirements specification. They are especially useful to discover exceptions to the normal process behaviour. You are then able to determine and describe how […]
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Ordering the Product Backlog
In this article, Brent Reid discusses the fact that in Scrum, the product backlog should be ordered and not prioritized. His point is that priority has a meaning only within a certain context. Thus what is high priority one day could be low priority in the future. Thus, the product owner must deliver a totally […]
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Relating Requirements to Implementation via Topic Analysis
Large organizations like Microsoft tend to rely on formal requirements documentation in order to specify and design the software products that they develop. These documents are meant to be tightly coupled with the actual implementation of the features they describe.
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Requirements Management Tools Market Survey
A recent Methods & Tools survey was dedicated to the software tools used to manage software requirements. The following question was asked: “How does your project manage the definition of requirements (text, user stories, models,…)?” Here are the answers:
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Stop Gathering Requirements
The concept of “gathering requirements” comes from the premise that there are requirements out there someplace that the business analyst has to find. But do users or stakeholders really have requirements? In this article, Steve Blais says that users don’t have requirements, so business analysts have to stop gathering requirements. His opinion is that user […]
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Successful Feature Injection
Feature injection is a business analysis approach that focuses on business value, an approach similar to Behavior Driven Development (BDD). It transfers knowledge to the team about how the project can deliver value and what are the features needed to deliver that value. Examples are used to transfer this information to the team in the […]
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