Requirement Gathering

Requirements serve as foundation for the IT system so it is essential that requirements must be clear,concise and complete to satisfy business needs. There are standard techniques used to collect the requirements of the system and requirements are identified through the elicitation,analysis and review activities.

There are following methods to perform requirement gathering :-

• Brainstorming
• Interviews
• Reverse Engineering
• Document Analysis
• Requirements Workshop(JAD)

Requirement gathering helps us to define the scope of the project and enables project managers to maintain the traceability of the requirements from requirement gathering stage to the product development and testing stage.

Explanation of Methods:-

• Brainstorming - When the common area of business interest in established and all stakeholders sit together to discuss various ideas. Consider various ideas and also analyse them to design a best solution which can help us achieve our goal and reach at consensus.
• Interviews - Process of asking relevant questions from the business stakeholders and documenting the responses. Methodology to ask questions must be designed in such a manner that we should be able to document the logical requirements. This documentation must be reviewed and approved from the stakeholder.
• Reverse Engineering - It is a process of analyzing the current functionality of the system to identify business processes ad rules. There are two types of reverse engineering White Box and Black Box reverse engineering. In Black box we need to understand the functionality of without going deep into the code/system. In white box we need to understand the system from depth.
• Document Analysis - It is a process to analyse the current system documents to gather as much as understanding of system functionality. This strategy is mostly used along with reverse engineering process to perform maintenance of system or to draft product manuals.
• Requirements Workshop - This workshop is not a normal meeting or group discussion because its a very focused event to gather requirements. Subject matter experts and key stakeholders are responsible to document the business requirements. Requirements workshop are generally referred as Joint Application Design(JAD). Wikipedia defines JAD as "It consists of a workshop where knowledge workers and IT specialists meet, sometimes for several days, to define and review the business requirements for the system." Those knowledge workers are domain experts and IT specialists are solution architects.