Requirements Gathering
Unequivocal clarification of project requirements, from a business and operational perspective, as well as how they may integrate with existing infrastructures, can cut months of development time (and, therefore, cost) whilst providing focus for the project itself.
This stage is undertaken by a dedicated iQuest team member known as a Domain Expert.
The role of the Domain Expert is to identify and write requirements in a combination of IT language, to facilitate subsequent stages, and common business language, to ensure that all project stakeholders understand and subscribe to the project parameters and scope.
The challenge of requirements gathering is in determining an effective way to capture all relevant elements needed to successfully build the system.
This includes an assessment of resource availability, budget allocation and time constraints.
We’ll also distil an organisation's knowledge about itself, in terms of processes, user needs and technological opportunities. As part of the process, we might help you define metrics for project success, factors you can measure to see how you're doing.
We apply either agile iterative processes or the Rational Unified Process (RUP), adapted to each customer’s business, operational and project context.
Agile
Within agile processes, we use SCRUM as an informal, customer and goal-oriented approach. This involves:
- Analysing user stories and conducting stakeholder interviews to define the business needs.
- Analysing all information to uncover the stated and implicit factors a company may consider most important to the project’s success.
- Creating a flexible and complete framework for product development
Rational Unified Process
With the RUP we start with workshops to gather the information necessary to define the business case. The process then involves:
- Interviewing system users (requirements elicitation phase) to establish their needs and/or wants in terms of system functionality.
- Building hands-on experience of the business processes currently in place, to allow us to envision the areas in which automation will best suit the present and future needs of the business.
Requirements Baseline
The requirements baseline clearly describes what the project team agrees to deliver.
Our process-driven use-case centric approach, involving the use of Unified Modeling Language, helps us reach a stage of requirement documents that are well understood and approved by the customer.
Requirements change management process and activities are rigorously identified and clearly stated.
All processes have clear artefacts (e.g. Vision Document) and goals defined. As we apply iterative processes, requirements are refined over the lifetime of the project, ensuring that clarifications that haven’t been revealed right from the start can also be addressed.