Preparing for requirements analysis
Before we start eliciting and modeling requirements, it is very important that we do the following:
- Understand who uses and/or influences our system, that is, the stakeholders. It is absolutely crucial that we know who will be interacting with our system before we try to understand what they want to achieve by using our system.
- Ensure that we use a common language with our stakeholders. The usage of different semantics and ambiguous terms can be catastrophic when eliciting requirements. I once got through the best part of a 1-hour meeting before realizing that three of us in the room were using the term session in totally different ways: my colleague – a network engineer – meant a TCP session, I was talking about an HTTP (browser) session, while our client – a stockbroker – was referring to a trading session! Ridiculous as it may sound, such mix-ups and ambiguities are all too common when people from different...
