This is the sixth post in the Beachcamp series. In this post, we discuss requirements analysis and provide a visual map showing what’s involved in it.

Beachcamp: Day 6

Requirements Analysis focuses on organising the gathered requirements, prioritising them to ensure that the “must” and “should” requirements will be verified with business and technical SMEs and then validated to be included into solution requirements. The initially stated requirements require “post-processing”. In other words, they need to be modelled and confirmed with the key SMEs.

Analysis of requirements focuses on functional and data requirements, required interfaces, modifications of business processes, logical design and possible risks to realisation of the requirements. The modelled and confirmed requirements need to be specified. Depending on the stability of the identified requirements, they can be either prioritised and then verified or verified straight away.

Validated requirements feed into the solution design and initial test plans. The validated requirements are also allocated to functional areas of the solution to facilitate better communication of the requirements to the project stakeholders. Enterprise Analysis takes into account all assumptions and constraints identified during Requirements Analysis. This information helps determine solution boundaries, project and solution scope.

In my practice I use requirements elicitation and requirements analysis jointly because it helps me shorten the duration of my tasks. Quickly prioritising the expressed requirements, I move them to the verification and validation stages using Use Cases as requirements packages.

Requirements analysis also identifies which components of the existing information landscape and business processes can be re-used. Re-usable parts improve the financials of the project, the solution leverages the stable existing components and shortens the duration of the design, development, test and implementation phases.

Requirements analysis supports requirements elicitation, planning and monitoring, enterprise analysis, solution assessment and validation, requirements management and communication. Requirements communication is in frequent use because a business analyst seeks support from technical and business SMEs, service operation and service strategy (ITIL).

Click on the image below to download a visual map of the requirements analysis section of the BABOK:


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