ВАВОК: Requirements analysis and design definition

When requirements have been elicited, they are still not ready to be sent to Developers because they can be inconsistent, not balanced, and the requirements set can be uncompleted (or, instead, overloaded). To solve this, all the requirements set, and each requirement separately, must be formatted properly, convenient for perception by both the analysts themselves and other colleagues, and analyzed.

During the analysis, a business analyst assesses the correctness of requirements from several points of view: its compliance with legislation, standards, customer rules, the project team’s ability to realize them, and, of course, whether these requirements are relevant to the project goals. As a result, the requirements set becomes a basis for creating a solution design. Mostly, such a design is created by other colleagues, but there are several kinds of design that have to be created by Business analysts themselves. For example, it can be business processes – updated, optimized, or newly created; it can be a new set of business rules, and so on. All of them should be properly written, modeled, and clear for different groups of stakeholders.

The course covers the Requirements Analysis and Design Definition knowledge area of BABOK® Guide – an internationally recognized standard for the practice of business analysis. BABOK was developed by the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA), summarizes the experience of leading business analysts around the world, describes 30 major business analysis tasks, and describes 50 techniques that are commonly used to solve these tasks.

The major challenge with self-studying the BABOK Guide is that, while describing typical tasks of business analysis, it does not explain when and how one should perform these tasks. It assumes that business analysts shall be able to answer these questions on their own, based on their personal experience and specifics of a particular project. Besides that, the BABOK Guide provides very few examples that might help analysts relate the theoretical knowledge to their daily practice. The purpose of this course is to overcome that challenge.

The course deals with multiple tasks performed by Business analysts during the requirements analysis and design definition, including the following:

• Requirements description and modeling;
• Requirements verification and validation;
• Requirements structuring and organization;
• Defining design options that meet business needs;
• Assessing the potential value of each design option.

A number of commonly used techniques will be considered in detail, including the conditions of their application, their benefits and weaknesses, as well as key aspects of this area of expertise. During the course, participants will get hands-on experience with the following techniques:

• User stories;
• Acceptance criteria;
• Data modeling;
• Brainstorming;