The Requirements Life Cycle Management knowledge area describes the tasks
that business analysts perform in order to manage and maintain requirements
and design information from inception to retirement. These tasks describe
establishing meaningful relationships between related requirements and designs,
assessing changes to requirements and designs when changes are proposed, and
analyzing and gaining consensus on changes.
The purpose of requirements life cycle management is to ensure that business,
stakeholder, and solution requirements and designs are aligned to one another
and that the solution implements them. It involves a level of control over
requirements and over how requirements will be implemented in the actual
solution to be constructed and delivered. It also helps to ensure that business
analysis information is available for future use.
The management of requirements does not end once a solution is implemented.
Throughout the life of a solution, requirements continue to provide value when
they are managed appropriately.
Within the Requirements Life Cycle Management knowledge area, the concept of
a life cycle is separate from a methodology or process used to govern business
analysis work. Life cycle refers to the existence of various phases or states that
requirements pass through as part of any change. Requirements may be in
multiple states at one time.
The most important tasks of Requirements Life Cycle Management are :
• Trace Requirements.
• Maintain Requirements.
• Prioritize Requirements.
• Assess Requirements Changes.
• Approve Requirements.
~Igor Ilin
Trace Requirements
ReplyDeleteTraceability is the ability to look at a requirement and others to which it is related, linking business requirements to stakeholder and solution requirements, to artifacts and to solution components.
Traceability enables:
• faster and simpler impact analysis,
• more reliable discovery of inconsistencies and gaps in requirements,
• deeper insights into the scope and complexity of a change, and
• reliable assessment of which requirements have been addressed and which
have not.
Why is requirements traceability important?
Tracing requirements, when done properly, saves time, money, and effort on the part of the analyst, the project sponsors and the parent organization. Business analysis industry experts have detailed the following benefits of requirements traceability
1 It ensures that final deliverables directly tie to initial business needs.
2 Done properly, it ensures that organizations do not waste time and resources repeating research.
3 It complies with established industry standards.
4 If offers much easier impact analysis.
As the Simran talked in detail about Trace requirements, i am going to explain further about maintain requirements. According to BABOK description, this is a requirement that we need to maintain the needs so that we can ensure it isvalid over the time. The requirements should be consistently represented, reviewed and approved for the maintenance by using a standard process, accessible easily and it should be understandable so that we can maximize the benefits.
ReplyDeleteThe core elements in maintenance requirements are as follows:
1. Maintain requirements: Requirements are maintained so that they can remain correct and current after significant approved changes. Business analysts also maintain the relationship among requirements, sets of requirements and it facilitate requirements.
2. Maintain attributes: Business analysts elicit requirement attributes. Some attributes change as the business analyst uncovers more information and conducts further analysis.
3. Reusing Requirements: In some situations, the requirements can be reused like within the current initiative, within similar initiatives, within similar departments and throughout the entire organization.
It follows techniques like Business rules analysis, data flow diagrams, document analysis, functional decomposition, process modelling, uses cases and scenarios and user stories.
Requirements are defined once and it is available for long term use by the organization. They can be used in future initiatives. If a requirement was not approved or implemented may be maintained for future initiatives.
However, the designs are reusable which are defined once.
As Igor mention on his post the most important tasks of Requirement Life Cycle Management are: Trace Requirement, Maintain Requirement, Prioritize Requirement, Assess Requirements Change and Approve requirement.
ReplyDeleteTalking about Trace requirement, we can define the concept as the monitor stage. This action can help the team to know how the project is going. The Traceability helps the team to ensure that te solutions and requirements are being following and support the communication management. Also, the traceability enables deeper insight into the scope and complexity of a change.
As named, Maintain Requirement, retain the requirement accuracy and consistency during the project or task. It’s easy to access this information and understandable because its used to maximize the benefit of maintaining and use where it is necessary.
The Prioritize Requirement’s function is to create a rank to know that action more relevant at the time for the project. Some tasks are prioritizing because it’s extremely valuable for the stakeholders. It’s a critical exercise that should be done carefully.
Assess Requirements Changes evaluate some implication of the propose of change and align with the overall view, alter and risk or opportunity and result can give a support for the decision maker.
Finally, the Approve Requirement. Business Analyst is responsible to clear communication between the stakeholder to avoid any type of misunderstand. The best will be to delivery the approval formally and document all the process.