Introduction
- What are business requirements? Why are they important?
- Review the requirements package.
- What are the differences between business and functional requirements?
- Review the 7 characteristics of “excellent” requirements.
- Review the 5 core requirements components.
|
1 hour |
Identifying and Defining Essential Business Processes
- Learn to identify essential business processes. An essential business process is a core requirement of the business area necessary to provide the right solution deliverable. Each business process must be clearly defined, consistently named, and completely decomposed.
- Students are given a template to document this detailed information and learn to identify essential processes from a case study.
- Learn to extract essential processes from real-world, detailed user description interview notes.
- Learn to use the process template as both an interviewing and documentation tool.
- Learn to look for redundant or reusable processes.
|
3 hours |
Process Analysis
- Learn to organize essential business processes in a process outline and decomposition diagram.
- Learn 3 major business process identification approaches and the situations in which each would work most effectively.
- Students will use each approach to identify detailed processes from a case study.
- Top down
- Bottom up
- Event partitioning
|
3 hours |
Documenting Business Rules
- Learn the major types of business rules and why each one should be documented.
- Review data-related business rules as they are documented in an entity relationship diagram.
- Learn to detail business rules that involve both data and process components.
- Learn several techniques for documenting business rules.
- Learn to extract business rules from different sources.
|
2.5 hours |
Finalizing the Business Requirements
- Learn to link the data and process elements to identify missing or incomplete requirements. Each essential process must use data, and each data element must be used by at least one essential process.
- Learn how test cases can help solidify requirements.
- Review a requirements completeness checklist.
- Obtain approval signoffs from appropriate stakeholders.
|
2 hours |
Translating Business Requirements to Functional Requirements
- Define the design area scope. Once the analysis is complete and the business requirements have been documented, the project team must decide which business processes will be automated.
- Learn a six-step approach to defining the design area scope:
- Document the functional design of each process.
- Document business priority.
- Document technical priority and estimated cost.
- Break project into phases.
- Workshop: Document design area using a use case diagram:
- Define actors involved with the application.
- Identify actor interactions.
- Learn multiple techniques to derive use cases from essential business processes.
- Obtain signoff.
|
3.5 hours |
Utilizing Workflow Analysis
- Learn to create detailed workflow diagrams using a number of techniques:
- ANSI standard flowchart
- Swimlane diagram
- Geographic diagram
- UML activity diagram
- Understand the benefits of each diagram to target each technique to a specific audience and need.
- Documenting AS IS vs. TO BE scenarios.
|
3 hours |
Documenting System Functionality
- Learn to identify use cases.
- Outline each use case for a high-level understanding of broad behavior.
- Identify primary path, alternate path, and exception paths.
- Decompose large use cases into smaller sub-sets, identifying reusable use cases where possible.
- Learn how and where to document system user messages.
- Learn 8 steps for excellent use case generation.
- Learn to create detailed use case descriptions.
- Workshop: Learn to document detailed use case descriptions using the B2T template.
|
3 hours |
Designing User Interfaces
- Learn to use completed documentation to identify where prototypes are necessary.
- Learn to document report requirements, including ad-hoc and predefined.
- Create and document prototypes.
- Learn to use provided templates to document field edits and screen functionality.
- Review usability considerations.
|
2 hours |
Documenting Additional Functional Requirements
- Identify requirements not previously addressed by business, functional, or technical requirement categories:
- Performance requirements
- Security requirements
- Quality requirements
- Scalability
- Discuss the business analyst role in the documentation of these requirements.
|
1 hour |
Workshop - Maintenance Case Study
- Identify essential processes and build a decomposition diagram.
- Determine the design area scope.
- Write a use case description.
- Document functional requirements for an online screen, report, and manual procedure.
|
3 hours |
Course Summary
- Review techniques appropriate for each project using real-world scenarios.
- Pull it all together; review the complete steps to business analysis.
|
1 hour |
