Requirements Engineering

Requirements Engineering

Requirements Engineering provides Business Analysts with a good grounding in a range of techniques for revealing, analysing and documenting business and system requirements. The course examines a range of elicitation techniques and how to record user requirements for an information system. Key areas such as prioritising requirements, resolving conflicting requirements and linking project objectives and requirements to the Business Case are also covered. Holders of the Certificate in Requirements Engineering should be able to:

• Act as effective members of a team involved in eliciting and recording user requirements for an information system.
• Recognise the nature of the requirements and the knowledge type to which they belong, and to select and use an appropriate elicitation technique.
• Be familiar with a range of elicitation techniques and know how to apply them effectively.
• Record and prioritise requirements, and be able to recognize and help resolve conflicting requirements.
• Link project objectives/requirements to the Business Case.
• Be aware of what CASE support exists for Requirements Engineering.

Course Syllabus

• The role of the analyst
  • The role and competencies of an analyst
  • Developing analyst competencies
• The requirements engineering process
  • The importance of requirements engineering
  • A framework for requirements engineering
  • Characteristics of requirements engineering
• Actors and viewpoints
  • Stakeholders in business analysis projects
  • Roles and responsibilities in the requirements engineering process
  • Context diagrams and stakeholders
• Project initiation
  • The importance of the project initiation stage
  • The project initiation document
• Facilitated workshops
  • The use of workshops to elicit, analyse and negotiate requirements
  • Structure of a facilitated workshop
  • Workshop roles
  • Facilitation skills
  • Stimulating creative thinking
• Fact-finding Interviewing
  • Structure of a fact-finding interview
  • Questioning techniques
  • Documenting interviews
• Documenting requirements
  • General business requirements
  • Functional and non-functional requirements
  • Technical requirements
  • The requirements catalogue
  • Interpreting class diagrams
  • Scoping systems and documenting requirements with use cases
• Other requirements elicitation techniques
  • Observation and ethnographic studies
  • Activity sampling
  • Document and data source analysis
  • Questionnaires
  • Choosing the appropriate technique/s
• Analysing requirements
  • Examining the requirements catalogue
  • Prioritising requirements (MoSCoW)
  • Checking for ambiguity and lack of clarity
  • Testability of requirements.
• Scenarios and prototyping
  • The use of scenarios to explore requirements
  • Use case descriptions as a method of documenting scenarios
  • The use of prototyping to explore requirements
  • Types of prototyping (throwaway, evolutionary etc.)
  • The dangers and difficulties of prototyping; managing prototyping exercises
• Requirements management
  • Change and version control of requirements
  • Requirements traceability
  • The use of CASE tools in requirements engineering
• Validating requirements
  • Validation techniques
  • Quality control in requirements engineering
• Requirements and systems development
  • Development lifecycles
  • The link between requirements and systems development
  • Post-implementation review