Requirements Gathering and Analysis

Gathering and eliciting software requirements is a key focus area in a software development lifecycle. It takes skill to prepare for, elicit, write and review requirements for a project.

Successful project teams have to understand their customer’s business needs to be able to deliver value-added solutions. Missed requirements and gaps in their understanding can cost the business money and loss of business opportunities. As a project leader, you need to have excellent meeting facilitation, communication, documentation, and business domain expertise.

Types Of Requirements

Business requirements are high-level ideas and concepts that describe why the business is
implementing the system (i.e., the objectives the client hopes to achieve). A project is
initiated because there is a business need. The stakeholders of the project develop the
details of the solution to satisfy the business need.
Functional requirements describe the required functionality or a behavior that a solution
will exhibit under specific conditions. Functional requirements specify the software
functionality that the developers must build into the product to enable users to
accomplish their tasks, thereby satisfying the business requirements. Sometimes called
behavioral requirements, these are the traditional “will” statements, describing what the
developer needs to implement. Developers use the functional and supplemental
requirements to design solutions that implement the necessary functionality and achieve
the specified quality and performance objectives within the limits that the constraints
impose.
System requirements describe the requirements for solution subsystems such security,
connectivity, hardware, software, business continuity and system access. A system can
consist of only software or it can include both software and hardware subsystems.

Requirements gathering and analysis includes collecting, analyzing and confirming requirements to solve a business solution.

Each project has an initiation phase, whether formal or informal. Agile or traditional waterfall project teams need some type of request for work from a project sponsor to build a product or solution. For large projects, a business case may be developed to justify a return on investment (ROI). The primary deliverable from project initiation is the project charter, which is a formal document that authorizes the project manager to use organizational resources to complete the project deliverables. The project charter also includes other important information such as the project description, deliverables, milestones, a high-level budget, assumptions, and constraints.

The reason we bring this up is due to the need to understand where to begin with requirements analysis. The project charter, business case, and Statement of Work (SOW) are the most ideal documents to review prior to orchestrating a requirement gathering strategy.

Review the following projects artifacts if available: