COEPD – Center of Excellence for Professional Development Happy Learning
Requirement elicitation is all about gathering requirements from the user or customers, stakeholders. These requirements gathered are done by interviews, questionnaires, observation, workshops, brainstorming, use cases, prototyping.
Challenges for requirements elicitation are unnecessary technical details, poor understanding of the capabilities and limitations, changing requirements over time.
While preparing questions from requirement elicitation, we work through each feature and prepare notes about my knowledge on features or my assumptions on it, and then draft those questions
For every requirement we will seek 5W 1H rule:
- How
- Where
- When
- Who
- What
- Why
- For requirements HOW questions would be like:
- How this feature will be used in the project?
- How this feature is a process and if it’s what are the steps?
- How this feature will meet the business need?
- How can we think this feature act as differently?
- How can we calculate that this feature is complete?
- For requirement WHERE questions would be like:
- Where does the process start in the project?
- Where this feature is accessible for the user?
- Where we can see the results of a process be visible?
- For requirement WHEN questions would be like:
- When this feature will be used in the project workflow process?
- When do you need to know about the details of the features in the project workflow?
- When we will know that the feature is failed?
- When can we start the project?
- For requirements WHO questions would be like:
- Who will be benefit with this feature?
- Who will be responsible for the feature?
- Who will give inputs for the project features?
- Who will know the results of using features?
- For requirements WHAT questions would be like:
- What I have to learn about this feature?
- What assumptions I made about features need to confirm?
- What does this feature do in project?
- What is the output of the process?
- What are the next steps for this feature?
- What is the before steps for this feature?
- What needs to be tracked related to this feature?
- For requirements WHY questions would be like:
- Why this feature is included?
- Why this project is initiated?
It is very important and a great skill for a business analyst to get clarity on questions asking.
- We learn and gain knowledge on the features and we come up with more accurate ways for solving a problem. And we have more opportunities to innovate better and can drive with creativity.
- With asking more questions, we can eliminate the assumptions made. And also, we gain clarity on the requirements. We can also avoid misunderstandings about the requirements.
- With the practice of asking more questions, we can make stakeholders talking and we can gather information as much as possible. We should make stakeholders all of the talking, because you’re gathering the information from the source. And the well-planned questions will assist stakeholders in delivering information which is helpful for analysis.
- The questions revolve around the roles and responsibilities, and their business or service, processes and procedures, events and schedules, location, and their policies, constraints, values, goals and drivers.
