Today I am discussing the tasks from the BABOK® associated with Requirements Analysis. These are the tasks to organize, prioritize, and model requirements and risks. There are six tasks associated with Requirements Analysis. I show the BABOK purpose. Then I discuss the impact on who and how in projects leveraging progressive elaboration, incremental delivery, close customer engagement, ongoing learning, and self organization.
Prioritize Requirements
| Purpose | Agile Impact |
| Prioritization of requirements ensures that analysis and implementation efforts focus on the most critical requirements. | In Agile, requirements are progressively elaborated. Throughout the Elicitation Task, Elicitation results are progressively broken down and elaborated. At each point of elaboration the constituent parts need to be evaluated and prioritized based on business value contribution and risk burn-down. In Agile, this is not a one-time up front activity. This happens throughout the life of the project on all remaining work and new work brought in from learning about the product. |
Organize Requirements
| Purpose | Agile Impact |
| The purpose of organizing requirements is to create a set of views of the requirements for the new business solution that are comprehensive, complete, consistent, and understood from all stakeholder perspectives. | In Agile, it is important to organize requirements to minimize dependencies between feature sets. This reduces complexity and risk and improves testability at the business value level. Since requirements are progressively elaborated, this can be shown as the Solution Architecture from a business standpoint. Expect this Solution Architecture to evolve based on feedback from the customer once they start to experience the product. Requirements should be organized around business value – and not technical implementations. Only within component teams – where the business value arises from delivering enabling technology – is it appropriate to depict technical requirements. Even then, these requirements need to be prioritized and filtered based on risk burn down and business value contribution. |
Specify and Model Requirements
| Purpose | Agile Impact |
| To analyze expressed stakeholder desires and/or the current state of the organization using a combination of textual statements, matrices, diagrams and formal models. | At different levels of elaboration there are different methods for specifying and modeling requirements. The approach should support progressive elaboration, is adaptable to change based on learning, and doesn’t box in the team to solutions too early. It should also ensure that intent and intended business value is communicated consistently through the elaboration. Agile teams tend to use Stories and Tasks at the lowest level of decomposition. These Stories and Tasks can be supported by detailed documentation and use cases. It is becoming increasingly common for acceptance tests to be produced as part of specifying and modeling the requirements. |
Define Assumptions and Constraints
| Purpose | Agile Impact |
| Identify factors other than requirements that may affect which solutions are viable. | On Agile projects this is handled through a risk management approach that treats risks as stories within themes. Risk mitigation activities are prioritized along with stories and burned down and re prioritized as they stories are performed. This is typically produced by the business analyst and project manager along with the team, prioritized by the product owner, and performed by the team. |
Verify Requirements
| Purpose | Agile Impact |
| Requirements verification ensures that requirements specifications and models meet the necessary standard of quality to allow them to be used effectively to guide further work. | Requirements are verified by the team during the project. Through retrospectives and operations reviews the team may decide to modify the level of detail to or the method of specifying and modeling requirements to improve the performance of the team. |
Validate Requirements
| Purpose | Agile Impact |
| The purpose of requirements validation is to ensure that all requirements support the delivery of value to the business, fulfill its goals and objectives, and meet a stakeholder need. | Requirements are verified throughout the development and delivery of the solution through continual involvement of the product owner and customer. This happens at release planning, iteration planning, during development, and at customer acceptance. |
Agile Requirements Analysis
All of the tasks in Requirements Analysis are important on Agile projects. The primary distinction in this Knowledge area is the support for the emergence of the solution over time. Particularly interesting is Define Assumptions and Constraints. While many Agile teams focus on the impediments to delivering code, they fail to manage the bigger risks and constraints associated with getting to business value.