Holistic View

There are many aspects to requirements engineering; these aspects, shown in the quadrants of the accompanying requirements grid, may be considered to collectively cover the realm of business, process, rules and data analysis, from strategy to implementation. Frequently these aspects are considered separately and may be associated with specialist roles such as business rules analyst or business process analyst, an architect or a project manager. But business analysts must be able to take a holistic view of the situation and every analyst should have an appreciation of the entire set.

The business analyst must be sensitive to the nature of the project at hand, to its characteristics and to the environment in which it is operating. Working with other stakeholders such as the project manager they should dynamically determine how to combine the aspects shown in the accompanying grid and to assign the optimal weight to each element in order to achieve a balanced approach.

The Activities quadrant in the requirements grid shows the activities typically associated with requirements engineering. But effective requirements engineering and business analysis should not be carried out in isolation.

Requirements need to be seen in a particular context. The context will help to ensure relevance and completeness and will affect how we capture and record requirements, in particular the level of detail and formality that is appropriate.

In conducting the requirements activities it is usually necessary to use one or more of the Enablers shown in the above chart. Separation of the individual enablers helps to manage complexity and supports the development of flexible and maintainable systems. Sometimes one aspect is touted as being somehow more important than the others; we will sometimes hear this from specialists in a particular enabler. Whilst not denying the value of specialists, every business analyst should have at least an appreciation of the entire set. They are all important.

To achieve success with requirements it is necessary that the business analyst works with other groups – these groups are shown in the Interfaces quadrant of the requirements grid.

The integrated approach, properly applied by professional analysts, will be a significant contributor to the rapid creation of high quality, relevant and useful requirements; these will be the basis for the development of systems that are needed by the business now and are readily adaptable to meet changing business needs. We believe that the approach maximises the chances of being right first time.