Requirements life cycle management
Tasks of requirements life cycle management:
post by Paramjeet Kaur Toor
1.Trace Requirements:
Trace requirements are for ensuring that requirements and designs of different stages are aligned to one another and for managing the effects of change. Trace requirements traces each requirements.
These requirements enables:
- faster and easier analysis of any impact
- more reliable discovery of inconsistencies and gaps in requirements
- deeper understanding into the scope
- reliable assessment of which requirements have been addressed and which have not.
Guideline and tools:
These tools provide good benefits when there is large number of requirements to trace.- Domain Knowledge: for supporting traceability of requirements, business domain knowledge is much important.
- Information Management Approach: provides decisions from planning activities concerning the traceability approach.
- Legal/Regulatory Information: describes rules that should be follow and also need to consider for defining traceability rules.
- Requirements Management Tools/Repository: used to store the information of business analysis. These tools can be small and big as well.
Techniques:
- Business Rules Analysis: used to trace rules to requirements that rules supports requirements.
- Functional Decomposition: used to allocate components by breaking solution scope into small parts also include tracing of high level concepts to low level concepts.
- Process Modelling: used to show the process for future state, as well as tracing requirements for future state.
- Scope Modelling: used to depict scope, as well as trace requirements to the area of scope the requirement supports
2. Maintain Requirements:
Maintain requirements used to maintain accuracy and consistency during and after any change throughout entire life cycle of requirements and also support to reuse requirements.In order to making maintaining and reusing requirements more beneficial:
- The requirements should be consistently represented,
- Reviewed and approved for maintenance using a standardized process that defines proper access rights and ensures quality
- Easily accessible and understandable.
Elements:
1. Maintain Requirements: Requirements are maintained so that they remain correct and update aft er change. Business analyst responsible for keeping maintenance in requirements and also between relationships of requirements.
2. Maintain Attributes: Business analyst elicit requirements attributes while eliciting requirements. some attribute change as the business analyst uncovers more information and conduct further analysis.
3. Reusing Requirements: Requirements that are for long term are identified, clearly named and stored in a manner that other stakeholder easily retrievable. Requirements that are represented in a general manner, tend to be more reusable. Therefore, in case of change these requirements less subject to revision.
3. Prioritize Requirements:
Priortize Requirements is used for ranking requirements in order of their importance. Priority refers to realtive value of requirements for stakeholder. Priorities changing as the context changes. Prioritization is a critical exercise that seeks to ensure the maximum value is achieved.
Elements:
1. Basis for Prioritization: The basis on which requirements are prioritized is agreed upon by relevant stakeholders as defined in the Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring knowledge area.
Factors that influence prioritization are:
- Benefit
- Penalty
- Cost
- Risks
- Stability etc.
2.Challenges of prioritization: It is challenging as each stakeholder may value different so confilects occurs between stakeholders. Stakeholder may also have difficulty for characterizing any requirements as lower priority. They also indicate priority to influence the result of their desire outcomes.
3. Continual Prioritization: Priorities get changing as context change and more information become more available so the level of prioritization changing. The basis for prioritization may be different at various stages of the change. For example, stakeholders may initially prioritize based on benefits. The implementation team may then re-prioritize the requirements based on the sequence in which they must be implemented due to technical constraints
Guidelines and Tools
- Business Constraints: contractual obligations and business policies that may define priorities.
- Change Strategy: provides information on costs, timelines, and value realization which are then used to determine requirements' relative value.
- Domain Knowledge: knowledge and expertise of the business domain needed to support prioritization.
- Governance Approach: outlines the approach for prioritizing requirements.
- Requirements Architecture: utilized to understand the relationship with other requirements and work products.
4. Assess Requirements Changes:
The purpose of Assess Requirements Changes is to evaluate the implications of proposed changes to requirements and designs. Assessment must be used to determine that weather proposed change increase the value of solution
Elements:
1 Assessment Formality: Business analysts will determine the formality of the assessment process that based on the available information, importance of the change, and the governance process. Even some of requirements declined before formal approval requirement. less formality is required in in adaptive approach in the assessment of proposed changes. Adaptive approaches try to minimize the impact of changes.2. Impact Analysis : Impact analysis is performed to assess the change effect. Traceability is useful tool for performing this task. While changing existing requirements business analysts consider some factors such as benefit, cost, schedule, impact and urgency.
3. Impact Resolution: Depending on the planned approach, various stakeholders may be authorized to approve, deny, or defer the proposed change. All impacts and resolutions resulting from the change analysis are to be documented and communicated to all stakeholders
5. Approve Requirements:
The purpose of Approve Requirements is to get agreement and approval of requirements and designs for business analysis work to continue.Elements:
1.Understand Stakeholder Roles : It is a part of approval process to understand stakeholder roles and authority levels. Business analysts are responsible for getting stakeholder approvals and are need to understand that who holds decision-making responsibility etc.2.Conflict and Issue Management: The approach for determining how to secure decisions and resolve conflicts across an initiative is planned for in the task Plan Business Analysis Governance
3. Gain Consensus : Business analysts also responsible to ensure that stakeholder who have approval and authority, understand and accepts requirements. Business analysts obtain approval by reviewing the requirements or changes to requirements with the accountable individuals or groups and requesting that they approve, indicating their agreement with the solution or designs described.
4.Track and Communicate Approval : The business analyst records approval decisions, possibly in requirements maintenance and tracking tools. In order to communicate the status of requirements, it is necessary to keep accurate records of current approval status.
The outputs of those tasks include the requirements and designs on different stages, as follows:
ReplyDeleteRequirements
1) Traced – the relationships of the requirements are defined, and the effects of change are clearly identifiable.
2) Maintained – may be reusable once defined.
3) Prioritized – prioritized or ranked requirements are available for additional work, in priority order.
4) Approved – requirements which are approved by stakeholders and are available to be used in following efforts.
Designs
1) Traced - the relationships of the designs are defined, and the effects of change are clearly identifiable.
2) Maintained – may be reusable once defined.
3) Prioritized – prioritized or ranked requirements are available for additional work, in priority order.
5) Approved – requirements which are approved by stakeholders and are available to be used in following efforts.
Trace Requirements which is also known as Requirements tracing is an important concept of management tracing which means that to tracing, analyzing, documenting and controlling all the work in the organization.
ReplyDeleteThere are following ways to do proper tracing the requirements which are as follows:
1. Always maintain the tractability of all requirements of needs in the organization.
2. Documented all changes to those requirements in a simple manner.
3. Record the changes in a rational database, so that it is easy to compare with the other aspect.
Approval of requirements and designs may be formal or informal. Predictive approaches approve the requirements or designs at the end of phase or during planned change meetings. Adaptive approaches typically approve requirements only when construction and implementation of a solution meeting the requirement can begin.
Maintain Requirements is the second step of requirements life cycle management, which can only be done after tracing the requirements. In trace requirements, we just able to know about requirements in the business and after this we have to maintain the requirements in correct way, so that it can be use in future.
Scotia bank also uses these two concepts when they were trying to meet the needs of their customers and their employees in order to provide them more independence in their work.
There are a variation of tasks that make up the business requirements management life cycle.
ReplyDeleteIn the requirements management task it is said that the requirements should remain accurate and consistent through the entirety of the life cycle. it also states that the requirements should have easy access and should be represented consistently. In Scotiabank it is key that requirements get approved. As stated in the blog, in order for business analyst work to continue past this stage the designs and requirements need to be approved and agreed upon. other important tasks in the blog are:
Trace requirements
prioritize requirements
and assess requirements changes.