Description:

Being a business analyst is not easy, and many common requirements definition methods don’t make it any easier. At one extreme are simplistic list-based approaches that are too imprecise, incomplete, and inconsistent for all but the simplest applications. At the other extreme is a knot of complex techniques that are indecipherable to most users and analysts, and thus produce results that are equally undependable.

What is needed are techniques that are repeatable by analysts, understandable and relevant to business subject matter experts, and useful to designers and developers. They should also divide the problem space into a reasonable number of perspectives, offer well-defined, progressive levels of detail, play well together, and be practical enough that you can achieve good results within your natural lifetime!

That’s a tall order, but it’s possible. This intensive, three-day workshop shows how to discover, document, and verify requirements using a small number of business-friendly yet powerful modelling techniques – workflow models, use cases, service specifications, and data models. Each addresses one fundamental aspect of the problem space:

  • What the business processes are, how they work now, and how they should work

  • How the application should behave in support of the process and people working in it

  • What the application should do in terms of validation, rules, functions, and record-keeping

  • What data structures will support the process, the application, and the reporting requirements

The material is drawn from Clariteq’s core offerings for business analysts – Working With Business Processes, Data Modelling, and Use Cases and Services.

Instead of textbook theory about what should work or what might work, this workshop covers what really works. You’ll get clear methods, templates, guidelines, and tips to help you get quality results and maximize the involvement of business subject matter experts. That’s because this workshop was developed by practitioners, for practitioners. The techniques have been developed, refined, and proven over years of real-world project experience. They’ve been used to support in-house development, offshore development, and package selection and implementation. Surprisingly, they’ve even been popular with Agile teams, because they support “just enough” modelling to get into the ballpark and then let iterative development take over.

Prerequisites:

None, although some understanding of information systems concepts will be helpful.

Target Audience:

Business analysts, systems analysts, and developers needing an introduction or refresher in modern, model-driven requirements specification techniques. Also, technical resources (programmers, UI designers, DBAs) interested in requirements definition, and project leaders, architects, and methodologists needing to understand current business analysis techniques.

Topics and key features:

  • Requirements definition – goals, issues, and an integrating framework

  • Process discovery and workflow modelling – idenitfying, scoping, and mapping processes

  • Data modelling – creating a common language and “world view”

  • Service specification – capturing business rules, data updates, and other internal behaviours

  • Use cases – discovering user expectations about a system’s external behaviour

  • Wrap-up – summary, guidelines, and notes on integrating the techniques