Requirements Engineering
Creating The Foundation for Lasting Success
Aviamedia approaches each project with the fundamental belief that true success for any project, large or small, from an enterprise ERP system to a brochure website, is a product of well-articulated requirements. The requirements, and the key information they contain, are the true asset to the business, not the system itself.
The Importance of Requirements
You have decided to seriously consider changing their existing business processes, or creating new ones. In most cases a consultant is requested only when a portion of the intended change involves automation, but a “Requirements Engagement” does not have to imply a new computer system – or any computer system at all. The purpose of a Requirements Engagement is to define the processes, information needs, business events, business resources, human resources, infrastructure, and interfaces (human and system) necessary to achieve a set of well-defined and measureable business goals. A well-executed Requirements Engagement will serve as the foundation for a successful project of any scope, because it gives project teams and management as clear and well-documented target as possible, by involving stakeholders and methodically articulating the requirements of the project.
The primary purpose of the Requirements Engagement is to get all the stakeholders together that affect a specific, impacted area of the enterprise, and cause them to discuss in a detailed and measurable way what must be changed to achieve the aforementioned business goals. A critical step in achieving concurrence on the goals is the teams’ development of “specific language” with which to discuss all of the components to be put in place.
Discussed "components" include:
- Organizations, work groups, and human resources
- Corporate locations and work areas
- Corporate assets, information, and infrastructure
- Well-defined business processes and work flows
- Business calendars and defined business events
The Aviamedia Approach to Requirements
The Aviamedia Approach starts by capturing the business goals and drivers behind the project:
- The External Agents that interact with the application functionally are identified. They are either User Interfaces to Work Groups (i.e., Roles) or they are System Interfaces to External Systems.
- Behaviors are defined at the Application Boundary from the perspective of each External Agent that interacts with the application through Workflow Analysis and Use Cases.
- The approach then continues to refine the specificity of the behaviors and information exchanges at the Application Boundary. As this is done, a Fact Model is developed and constraints are identified and documented against that model – business rule constraints, architectural constraints, non-functional behavioral constraints, etc.
- As constraints are added, the requirements for error processes emerge – error processing is nothing more or less than what to do when a constraint is violated. The more specific the constraint definitions, the more extensive the need to define error processes.
Further Reading
Download our White Paper "Aviamedia Requirements Engagement Philosophy"
