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You should question everything.
Impertinence
Your role is to find the best solution to a business problem or opportunity.
Impartiality
Assume that anything is possible and eliminate the infeasible.
Relax constraints
Every fact must fit with every other fact.
Attention to detail
You must consider how each user views his or her requirements.
Reframing
(Deliverables) From interviews and observations
Interview transcripts, observation notes, meeting minutes
(Deliverables) From existing written documents
Business mission and strategy statements, sample business forms and reports and computer displays, procedure manuals, job descriptions, training manuals, flowcharts and documentation of existing systems, consultant reports
(Deliverables) From computerized sources
JAD session results, CASE repositories, system prototype displays, and reports
Traditional Methods for Determining Requirements
Interviewing and Listening
Interviewing groups
Directly observing users
Analyzing procedures and other documents
Dialogue with users or managers to obtain their requirements.
Interviewing
Two forms of Interviewing
1. Open-ended: conversational, questions with no specific answers in mind.
2. Closed-ended: structured, questions with a limited range of possible answers.
Guidelines for Effective Interviewing
Plan the interview.
–Prepare interviewee: appointment, priming questions.
–Prepare agenda, checklist, questions.
Listen carefully and take notes (record if permitted).
Review notes within 48 hours.
Be neutral.
Seek diverse views.
Is a document for developing, planning and conducting an interview.
Interview Guide
Interview several key people together.
Interviewing Groups
A facilitated process that supports idea generation by groups.
Nominal Group Technique
Watching users do their jobs. Can provide more accurate information than self-reporting (like questionnaires and interviews).
Direct Observation
Review of existing business documents. Can give a historical and “formal” view of system requirements.
Document Analysis
Types of information to be discovered:
–What problems exist with the existing system?
–Are there opportunities to meet new needs?
–What’s the organizational direction?
–Who are the “key stakeholders?
–What are the values of the organization?
–Are there any special information processing circumstances?
–What’s the history of the current system design?
–Are there rules for processing data?
Four types of useful documents
Written work procedures
Business forms
Reports
Descriptions of current information system
Describes how a job is performed. Includes data and information used and created in the process of performing the job or task.
Written work procedures
Explicitly indicate data flow in or out of a system.
Business forms
It enables the analyst to work backward from the report to the data that generated it.
Reports
The official way a system works is described in the organization’s documentation. Procedure documents describe the formal system.
Formal
The way a system works in practice. Interviews and observation reveal an informal system.
Informal
Brings together key users, managers, and systems analysts. Purpose: collect system requirements simultaneously from key people. Conducted off-site
Joint Application Design (JAD)
Facilitate sharing of ideas and voicing of opinions about system requirements.
Group Support Systems
Used to analyze existing systems. Help discover requirements to meet changing business conditions.
CASE tools
Iterative development process. The rudimentary working version of the system is built. Refine understanding of system requirements in concrete terms.
System prototypes
Quickly converts requirements to a working version of the system.
Prototyping
Search for and implementation of radical change in business processes to achieve breakthrough improvements in products and services.
Business Process Reengineering (BPR)
Note
Flashcard