Section 5 - Investigating the business situation (12.5%) Flashcards
What is the purpose of eliciting requirements?
To get as much reliable information as possible from stakeholders
What are the 3 types of information to elicit?
- Strategic: MI needs, terms of reference, align with objectives
- Tactical: performance targets, Who, What, Why
- Operational: As Is, How, Where, docs, problems
What are workshops?
A collaborative event in which discussion occurs to reach a particular objective
Why are workshops useful?
- Opportunity to resolve conflict
- Provides initial meeting for attendees
- Easier to get things signed off
- Minimal distractions
What are the issues with workshops?
- Need to be well organised with objectives + agenda
- Need to get the right audience
- Venue choice is important
What are the discovery workshop techniques?
- Round robin
- Brainstorming
- Brainwriting: ideas anonymously written on notes then collated into document
- Post-It exercise: post its then stuck on board can then move/group
- Stepwise refinement: start high level and break down into more steps, these are then broken down further
- Breakout groups
What are the visualisation discovery techniques?
- Process models
- Rich picture
- Mindmap: the visualisation of brainstorming
- Context diagrams: high level, details wider context of a problem
- Task scenarios: come off process maps, details longer processes
- User stories
What are the 4 types of observation?
- Formal observation: watch a task being performed + formally record steps involved
- Protocol Analysis: watch a task being performed + taskee explains what they are doing
- Shadowing: follow someone performing multiple tasks, useful for multiple business issues
- Ethnographic study: do the job yourself + record what happens
Why is observation useful?
- See what is really happening
- Gets people involved
- Process maps
- Relationship development
What are the issues with observation?
- Could see what should happen not what actually does
- Time consuming for you but not stakeholders
- Only get info from what happened at that time
Briefly explain interviews
- 1:1
- Often easier with senior stakeholders
- Require a lot of prep + structure
- Send questions to interviewee pre meeting
- Who, How, What, Where, When
- Notes need to be taken + approved by interviewee
Why are interviews useful?
- Relationship development
- Clear expression of a person’s view
What are the issues with interviews?
- Potential for conflicting or duplicate requirements
- Time consuming for you
- Cannot share experience with others
Briefly explain scenarios?
- Use a real situation to test the process + requirements
- Scenarios need to be real + representative
- Identify task –> Identify the steps + sequence –> Define control conditions –> identify exceptions
Why are scenarios useful?
- Real test to solution
- Checks knowledge
- Easy to visualise situation
What are the issues with scenarios?
- Easy to believe that the scenarios are the only situations the system needs to cope with
- Can be time consuming and complex
Briefly explain prototyping
- Mock up of screens or model of process of what has been asked for. Can then edit accordingly
- Helps identify non-functional requirements
- More focused to the To Be situation
Why is prototyping useful?
- Visualisation of requirements
- Avoids complexity of integration with other systems
- Assessment of navigation path + non-functional requirements
What are the issues with prototyping?
- Mistaken belief that issue is solved
- Look + feel may not match final solution
- Potential demo + prototype spiral
Briefly explain user role analysis
- Look at how people use the proposed solutions
- Mostly done with personas
Why is user role analysis useful?
- Makes requirements real
- Makes it reflective
What are the issues with user role analysis?
- Mindful of stereotyping
- Huge number required
- If user type missed a whole suite of problems may be realised
What are the 4 types of quantitative approaches?
- Surveys or questionnaires: send out many identical question sets
- Special purpose records: how many times do you? Or does this happen?
- Activity sampling: how long does x take?
- Document analysis: sample documents created and scrutinised
Why are quantitative approaches useful?
Statistically useable results
- Consistent
- Can be geographically distributed
- Gather same info from many people
What are the issues with quantitative approaches?
- Must test first
- Results can be unreliable
- Can lead to false assumptions from anomalous results
In what 5 ways can the current business situation be visually documented?
- Rich picture: shows interactions between key actors
- Mind maps
- Business process models
- Spaghetti maps
- Fishbone diagrams
What does the BCS book assume?
That most things would occur face to face and teams calls are not used
