Requirements Engineering

This course is recommended for people who already have some experience in gathering and documenting requirements and who need to formalise their skills. Typical attendance includes:

• Current and prospective Business Analysts looking to improve their hands-on requirements engineering skills.
• Business Analysts looking to accredit their skills for recognition among employers, clients and peers.
• BAs of any level looking to achieve the BCS International Diploma in Business Analysis.
• Anyone seeking an understanding of what constitutes quality requirements

This course is not recommended for people with no previous experience. If you are a new business analyst or you would like to become a business analyst we recommend our Fundamentals of Business Analysis training course, which provides more in-depth training covering the complete role of the business analyst.

Upon completion of the course

• Explain the importance of linking requirements to the Business Case
• Describe the roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders in the requirements engineering process
• Explain the use of a range of requirements elicitation techniques and the relevance of the techniques to business situations
• Analyse, prioritise and organise elicited requirements
• Document requirements
• Identify problems with requirements and explain how requirements documentation may be improved
• Create a model of the features required from a system
• Interpret a model of the data requirements for an information system
• Describe the principles of Requirements Management and explain the importance of managing requirements
• Describe the use of tools to support Requirements Engineering
• Explain the process and stakeholders involved in Requirements Validation

Attendance on the Business Analysis Foundation course or equivalent knowledge and experience.

• Introduction to Requirements Engineering
• Framework for requirements engineering:
• The business rationale and inputs.

• Hierarchy of Requirements
• Building the hierarchy through decomposition of requirements.
• Categories of requirements within the hierarchy:

• General business requirements, including legal and business policy.

• Technical policy requirements.

• Functional requirements.

Non-functional requirements, including performance, usability, access, security, archiving, back up and recovery, availability, robustness.

• Stakeholders in the Requirements Process
• The definition of the term'stakeholder'
• Project Stakeholders.
• Business Stakeholders.
• .

• Requirements Elicitation
• Knowledge types – tacit and non-tacit.
• Elicitation techniques:

• Interviews.

• Workshops.

• Observation - formal/informal, shadowing.

• Focus groups.

• Prototyping.

• Scenarios.

• Document analysis.

• Special purpose records.

Questionnaires.

Understanding the applicability of techniques.

• Use of Models in Requirements Engineering
• The purpose of modelling requirements:

• Generating questions.

• Cross-checking for consistency and completeness.

Defining business rules.

Modelling the business context for the system using a context diagram that identifies the inputs and outputs of the system.

Developing a model to represent the system processing requirements - use case diagram.

Interpreting a data model based upon the system data requirements - class diagram.

• Requirements Documentation
• Documentation styles and levels of definition.
• Requirements catalogue.
• Requirements document.

• Requirements Analysis
• Prioritising and packaging requirements for delivery.
• Organising requirements:

• Requirements filters.

Characteristics of a good requirement.

Prototyping requirements.

Verifying requirements.

• Requirements Validation
• Agreeing the requirements document.
• Types of reviews:

• Informal reviews.

• Structured walkthroughs (author-led review).

• Technical reviews.

Inspections.

Stakeholders and their areas of concern.

• Requirements Management
• Dealing with changing requirements.
• The importance of traceability:

• Vertical traceability (to business objectives).

Horizontal traceability (from origin to deliver).

Traceability and ownership.

Requirements engineering support tools.