Requirements engineering

Requirements Engineering has been developed from our twenty years of experience of consultancy, training and software development. It presents a range of key techniques for discovering, analysing and documenting business and system requirements and places these within the context of our own ADAPT© framework for requirements engineering. The emphasis of the course is very much on providing participants with ''hands on'' experience of actually using the techniques as they work through a realistic case study scenario. A comprehensive course manual supports the course but also provides a valuable ''how to'' reference guide for participants to use in their day-to-day work.

In addition to covering the full ISEB syllabus, this course is approved as consistent with the IIBA BABoK version 1.6

ISEB qualifications

The course prepares participants to sit the one-hour, open book, examination leading to the certificate in Requirements Engineering offered by the Information Systems Examinations Board (ISEB). This certificate is also a core module for the ISEB Business Analysis Diploma.
SFIA MappingNon-functional needs analysis level 5.

1. The role of the analyst
   • The role and competencies of an analyst
   • Developing analyst competencies
2. The requirements engineering process
   • The importance of requirements engineering
   • A framework for requirements engineering
   • Characteristics of requirements engineering
3. Actors and viewpoints
   • Stakeholders in business analysis projects
   • Roles and responsibilities in the requirements engineering process
   • Context diagrams and stakeholders
4. Project initiation
   • The importance of the project initiation stage
   • The project initiation document
5. Facilitated workshops
   • The use of workshops to elicit, analyse and negotiate requirements
   • Structure of a facilitated workshop
   • Workshop roles
   • Facilitation skills
   • Stimulating creative thinking
6. Fact-finding Interviewing
   • Structure of a fact-finding interview
   • Questioning techniques
   • Documenting interviews
7. 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
8. Other requirements elicitation techniques
   • Observation and ethnographic studies
   • Activity sampling
   • Document and data source analysis
   • Questionnaires
   • Choosing the appropriate technique/s
9. Analysing requirements
   • Examining the requirements catalogue
   • Prioritising requirements (MoSCoW)
   • Checking for ambiguity and lack of clarity
   • Testability of requirements.
10. 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
11. Requirements management
    • Change and version control of requirements
    • Requirements traceability
    • The use of CASE tools in requirements engineering
12. Validating requirements
    • Validation techniques
    • Quality control in requirements engineering
13. Requirements and systems development
    • Development lifecycles
    • The link between requirements and systems development
    • Post-implementation review