Abstract

Many big books on software requirements and business analysis recommend dozens and dozens of practices. They’re all useful in appropriate situations, but it’s daunting to try to remember—let alone implement—the whole set consistently. However, every project should perform 20 core requirements activities. These lay a solid foundation for success and help teams efficiently and effectively elicit, analyze, specify, validate, and manage their requirements. These practices are valuable for both traditional and agile projects, regardless of the kind of product you’re building.
 
This presentation identifies those 20 core practices and drills down into several of them. They can help project and product teams understand the business problem, engage the right participants, articulate effective solutions, communicate information among stakeholders, implement the right functionality in the right sequence, and adapt to change. Do you have to perform all 20 of these on your project? Maybe not, but you’ll feel less pain and get better results if you do.

Learning Objectives

• Identify the 20 requirements practices that contribute most heavily to business analysis success
• Understand how to apply certain of those practices on both agile and traditional projects
• Enable you to begin a self-assessment of how to improve your team’s requirements practices

Karl Wiegers

Karl Wiegers is Principal Consultant with Process Impact. He has a PhD in organic chemistry. Karl is the author of 14 books, including Software Requirements Essentials (with Candase Hokanson), Software Requirements (with Joy Beatty), Software Development Pearls, The Thoughtless Design of Everyday Things, Successful Business Analysis Consulting, and a forensic mystery novel titled The Reconstruction. Karl has delivered more than 650 training courses, webinars, and conference presentations worldwide. You can reach him at ProcessImpact.com or KarlWiegers.com, where you can also hear more than 50 songs he has recorded just for fun, including 18 originals that he wrote.

In collaboration with Bluegrass, Chicagoland, DC Metro, Halifax, Ottawa-Outaouais, Palmetto, Raleigh, St. Louis, Southeast Michigan, and Tampa Bay IIBA Chapters.