TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES FOR COLLECTING REQUEIREMENTS:

Throughout all your activities, of course, you'll use the first technique, expert judgment.
That of your own and those around who have the expertise you require for your work.

One group of techniques you could use to collect project requirements is data
gathering. Some data gathering techniques include brainstorming, which we will cover
in detail in a moment. They also include conducting interviews with stakeholders,
subject matter experts, and people who've worked on related projects. These people
can help you identify what features and functions a product or service should have.
Most often, you'll hold one-on-one interviews. You can ask the person you interview a
set of questions you've prepared and any other questions that come up, and you
record the person's responses.

Focus groups, another data gathering technique, are a less formal way of collecting
project requirements. In a group of stakeholders and subject matter experts, you guide
an interactive discussion about what a proposed product or service must deliver. This
can help you find out what expectations the stakeholders have. Usually a focus group
includes stakeholders with a similar role or perspective. You use the group to collect
requirements focused on a specific aspect of a project, like the design of a product or
the technical requirements it must meet. And questionnaires let you gather responses
to a set of written questions. Using these tools, you can get information from a large
number of people quickly. And information gathered in this way can usually be
evaluated using statistical analysis. You could use an online questionnaire, for
instance, to find out which features customers across the country value most in a new
car. But it probably wouldn't be a good idea to use a questionnaire to find out what
requirements executive managers in your company have for a new car model.

Benchmarking is another data gathering technique and involves studying how other
organizations create similar products and identifying best practices and new
innovations.

One important data gathering technique is brainstorming. Brainstorming allows you to

generate and capture many ideas about project and product requirements.
Brainstorming is a great way to generate an unstructured list of possible project
requirements. This is because it encourages everyone in a group to have their say.
And what one person says often inspires someone else with a new idea. For a
brainstorming session to work, it's important to follow four rules. Identify the objective
or problem and post it where everyone can see it. Although brainstorming isn't very
structured, its focus must be clear. For example, an objective might be to develop
requirements for a new product. Record all the ideas stakeholders come up with so no
good ideas are lost. Make sure nobody criticizes other people's ideas. This can cause
conflict and keep people from having their say openly. Also, negativity greatly hampers
creativity but positivity fosters it. Encourage everyone to build on other people's ideas.
One especially effective strategy is to use brainstorming after you've already created a
mind map. The purpose of the brainstorming session would be to clarify the earlier set
of requirements.
Another important class of techniques is data analysis techniques. These include
document analysis, which involves studying documents such as business plans,
marketing materials and issue logs to identify requirements.

Decision-making is another key technique. Decision making methods can include

voting and multi-criteria decision analysis. Voting methods include unanimity, majority,
plurality, and autocratic voting. In unanimity, everyone agrees with the decision. In a
majority, more than 50% of the group members agree on the decision. A plurality
indicates of all the choices, one decision has the highest number of votes, even if a
majority is not achieved. For instance, if there are three choices, the top choice may
represent 45% of the votes, while the second and third choices represent 29% and
26%, respectively. In an autocratic method or dictatorship, one person decides for the
group, this might sound bad, but in certain situations it is appropriate. For instance, a
risk manager may decide that a particular product feature will not be included because
it adds too much risk. Multicriteria decision analysis involves a systematic approach,
using a matrix to determine the best decision.

Another technique you use to collect requirements includes data representation

techniques, such as affinity diagrams and mind mapping. An affinity diagram can be
used to classify large amounts of data and numbers into groupings so the information
is easier to review and analyze. A mind map is useful because it brings together a lot of
ideas. It groups these ideas visually to make it clear how they relate or differ. At the
center of the map is the problem to be solved. As you think of ideas, you build
branches out from the center, each branch groups related ideas. At the end of each
branch, you get to specific ideas that develop from more general ones. When you're
collecting project requirements from a group of stakeholders, the specific ideas you
want to get to at the end of each branch are project requirements.

Interpersonal and team skills are another group of techniques key for effective
requirements gathering. And there are several methods, including the nominal group
technique, observation and conversation, and facilitation. First, we'll discuss nominal
group technique. It is a prioritization tool that lets you guide a group of stakeholders in
identifying which requirements are the most important. The technique can include
brainstorming ideas and then ranking them. Or, if you've already used techniques like
brainstorming, it can involve ranking a list of possible project requirements that you've
already put together. An advantage of the nominal group technique is that it lets each
stakeholder in a group have a say about what's most important to them. Another
advantage is that ideas are anonymous, so idea sharing can happen without leading to
conflict. The way people rank their requirements can even stay secret. In case you're
curious, it's called nominal group technique because it's done with a group of people,
but the decision-making happens at the individual level. For example, let's say there
are three possible requirements and only one of them can be included in the final
product. Stakeholders can rank the three requirements in order of what they like the
most to the least. In order to score the vote properly, the facilitator will determine the
weight of a first place vote, second place vote, and so on. The requirement that has the
highest overall score is the requirement that will be included, and it may not be the
requirement that had the most number one votes. A variation on the nominal group
technique in Agile is called buy a feature. Stakeholders are given play money which
they can distribute as they wish among the possible features, the feature with the
greatest buying will be included.

Observation is a unique way of identifying requirements. Watching how a task or

process is performed can make you aware of requirements you wouldn't have thought
of otherwise. Job shadowing is a form of observation and involves watching a person
or group of people as they perform their job. This is especially useful for complicated
processes, or when the people who will use a product or service find it difficult to
clearly express their requirements. For example, you might watch an accounting clerk
process accounts. This could help you collect requirements for a new accounting
system. You'd be able to record the exact steps required and might see how the job of
the clerk could be made easier. Conversation with the observee allows you to gain any
insight you may need.

And facilitation involves creating an atmosphere of trust amongst participants, typically

during workshops, to illicit the appropriate information for collecting requirements.
Effective facilitation can build and maintain trust, foster relationships, and open
communication between the project team members.

There are two other tools and techniques for collecting requirements, context diagrams
and prototypes. Context diagrams are a useful model of the inputs and outputs of a
system and all the people surrounding its use.

A prototype is a working model of a product. You can create a prototype early in a

project and let stakeholders use it to see how well it meets their needs. This is a much
more concrete way to collect requirements than simply asking stakeholders what they
need. Prototypes are the most useful if a project must deliver something people will use
to complete tasks. For example, to help collect project requirements for a new
accounting system, a project team built a prototype of the system. The project manager
asks a focus group of accounting managers and end users to try using the prototype to
perform accounting tasks. Using an online spreadsheet, all group members give
immediate feedback about the system as they use it. The manager then meets with the
group to get more general feedback. Based on what he learns, the team refines the
prototype and lets the focus group test it again. Once it's clear the prototype meets all
requirements, work on building the final accounting system can start.

So now we have a list of all of the categories of tools and techniques, expert
judgement, data gathering techniques, data analysis, decision making, data
representation, interpersonal and team skills, context diagrams, and prototypes. All of
these tools and techniques are used in combination to effectively gather the
requirements for your project.