BCS Requirements Engineering

Course Overview

On our BCS Requirements Engineering course our delegates learn to apply a range of techniques for revealing, analysing and documenting requirements and gain an industry-recognised certification so they can build skills and confidence to solve business problems and enable effective change. After completing this course, learners will be able to:

• Act as an effective member of a team involved in eliciting and recording user requirements for an information system.
• Recognise the nature of the requirements and the knowledge type to which they belong.
• Be familiar with a range of elicitation techniques and know-how to apply them effectively.
• Record and prioritise requirements, and be able to recognise and help resolve conflicting requirements.
• Link project objectives/requirements to the business case.
• Find out the common problems that occur with IT projects and how the requirements engineering framework can help address these issues.

Requirements Engineering

The role of the analyst

• The role and competencies of an analyst.
• Developing analyst competencies.

The requirements engineering process

• The importance of requirements engineering.
• A framework for requirements engineering
• Characteristics of requirements engineering.

Actors and viewpoints

• Stakeholders in business analysis projects.
• Roles and responsibilities in the requirements engineering process.
• Context diagrams and stakeholders.

Project initiation

• The importance of the project initiation stage.
• The project initiation document.

Facilitated workshops

• The use of workshops to elicit, analyse and negotiate requirements.
• Structure of a facilitated workshop.
• Workshop rules.
• Facilitation skills.
• Stimulating creative thinking.

Fact-finding interviewing

• Structure of a fact-finding interview.
• Questioning techniques.
• Documenting interviews.

Documenting requirements

• General business requirements.
• Functional and non-functional requirements.
• Technical requirements.
• The requirements catalogue.
• Interpreting class diagrams.
• Scoping systems and documenting requirements with use cases.

Other requirements elicitation techniques

• Observation and ethnographic studies.
• Activity sampling.
• Document and data source analysis.
• Questionnaires.
• Choosing the appropriate technique/s.

Analysing Requirements

• Examining the requirements catalogue.
• Prioritising requirements (MoSCow).
• Checking for ambiguity and lack of clarity.
• Testability of requirements.

Scenarios and prototyping

• The use of scenarios to explore requirements.
• Use case descriptions as a method of documenting scenarios.
• The use of prototyping to explore requirements.
• Types of prototyping (throwaway, evolutionary, etc.)
• The dangers and difficulties of prototyping; managing prototyping exercises.

Requirements Management

• Change and version control of requirements.
• Requirements traceability.
• The use of CASE tools in requirements engineering.

Validating requirements

• Validation techniques.
• Quality control in requirements engineering.

Requirements and systems development

• Development life-cycles.
• The link between requirements and systems development.
• Post-implementation review.