Overview

This course is designed to provide a basic understanding of eliciting, analyzing, and modeling requirements. It is not expected that this course will provide the depth of knowledge for the participant to be fully competent at the various elicitation and modeling techniques, but rather to understand their value and have sufficient knowledge to read and analyze models created by others and produce business and software requirements documentation independently.

Audience

This course provides an effective primer for those who:

• Are transitioning into a requirements practitioner function, including business analyst or business systems analyst.
• Manage or interact with requirements practitioners and the requirements artifacts they create.

Objectives and Outcomes

Participants will have the necessary foundation skills to:

• Create basic requirements diagrams and understand complex diagrams created by others.
• Know how to produce effective text-based requirements documentation using declarative text and simple UML use case descriptions.

Prerequisites

None.

Content Outline

Unit 1: Context Overview

• Requirements versus design specifications and solutions.
• Overview of standard requirements taxonomies: Business requirements, functional requirements, non-functional requirements.
• The relationship between business functions and business processes.
• You get what you ask for: requirements elicitation.
• Static/structure versus dynamic/behaviour focused process modeling.

Unit 2: Requirements Elicitation

• Comparative Analysis for Value:
  – Interviews, Facilitated Sessions, Surveys.
• Staging elicitation for maximum throughput and ease of approval.
• Dealing with requirements change.

Unit 3: Modeling with Diagrams

• Business and System Context Diagrams:
  – When to use them, external agents, inputs and outputs, things to watch for include, Black holes, gray holes, and miracles.
• System Use Case Diagrams:
  – When to use them, comparison with system context diagrams, the subject system, actors, use cases, associations, staying focused on requirements, not design specifications.
• Workflow Diagrams.
• Swimlane diagrams, UML Activity Diagrams, and BPMN workflow.

Unit 4: Modeling with Tables

• Data Catalogues.
• Message Catalogues.
• Business Rule Catalogues.
• Decision Tables.

Unit 5: Modeling with Text

• Declarative Text: Seventeen guidelines for establishing requirements clarity and precision using text.
• Structured Text: System use case text detail.

Offered in partnership with ACHIEVEBLUE™ Corporation. © 2017 All rights reserved.