Critical Skills for Writing Better Requirements

Good requirements are crucial for any type of product development. Begin with the end in mind, have a clear vision of success and articulate the customer needs in clear, testable ways that work for different stakeholders in the software development lifecycle.

Industry studies around the world suggest that five out of every six software projects fail or are “challenged” – over time and/or over budget. Looking through a requirements lens, we see that some of the main contributors are:

• A poor understanding of the VISION or expected business outcome affecting top-down requirements practices
• Poorly defined requirements, especially the lack of emphasis on Quality or Non-Functional requirements
• Poor management of changes to requirements (affecting scope management in particular)
• Insufficient customer and user involvement in defining, confirming and managing requirements.

A vague understanding of expected business outcomes combined with insufficient skills to write, communicate and control effective requirements (whether for Agile or more linear approaches to software development) will lead to the invention of requirements – usually by the programmer. But the decisions that software developers make are often different from the decisions a subject matter expert would make under the same circumstances. Where a project fails – it is often seen as a direct result of poor requirements practices.

This hands-on one-day (2 x half day remote sessions) workshop builds on your existing business  analysis knowledge through practical exercises and examples.

You'll learn

During this course you will learn about:

• What is a requirement?
• Characteristics of good requirements
• Requirement types and levels
• Business rules and other constraints
• Deriving requirements from use cases
• Deriving requirements from user stories
• Deriving requirements from data models
• Maintaining requirements as change happens
• Requirements in agile projects