Listen to this article
Requirement gathering represents the onset of software testing is one of the most crucial and primary stages of the software development lifecycle. Requirement gathering is a skill that every analyst should supposedly possess. In fact, poor requirement gathering is one of the major causes of project problems that may seem to happen across organizations.
We all know the role an organization plays in requirement gathering, however, we forget to draw the due from the clients; as they are the major force behind shaping up of the entire process. They are the ones who know what is the exact requirement and how the solution should start shaping up. Clients can help shape up the requirement gathering template by several levels. Not only in the development stage but also during the software testing we can design test cases based on these requirements.
If we are going to go by the stages of requirement gathering; then mentioned below are the core 4 steps.
- Initiation
- Validation
- Specification
- Verification
-
Initiation
This is the first step of the requirement gathering. This is the step wherein the initial documentation is done pertaining to understand the scope of the project. Also, the analyst necessarily uses this stage in order to ask and understand any questions that are arising in their mind to clarify their base concepts. Initiation uses several techniques whose dependency is on certain circumstances. The initiation can be facilitated with several mediums such as interviews, managerial and core concepts sessions, questionnaires, prototypes, models, and more.
Role of the client
The client is the flagbearer of this stage, as they already have the entire knowledge about their agenda and share the key details. They can not only help in making the process swift but also help facilitate additional resources or mediums to pace up the primary requirement process. Clients can help you take crucial notes on the prime facts as well as warn you about the immediate challenges.
-
Validation
Validation is the step where the “analyzing” begins. The idea of validation is to make sure that the material conveyed through elicitation precisely represents the requirements and expectations of the customers and stakeholders. The work at this point includes combining requirements, justifying them, and generating models to assist the visualization processes.
[the_ad id=”2867″]
Validation is the second step in the requirement gathering process. This is the step wherein all the analysis begins; the main purpose of validation is to make sure that the knowledge transfer and information sharing that happens during the initiation is the representative of the expectations of both the clients as well as stakeholders.
Role of the client
The client is once again on the front foot here. The knowledge transfer and the information that must be validated has to come from the client. They are one who can differentiate chalk and cheese in this case. Also, they can help in rounding off the information that is required per stage. They can further componentize their expectations as per individual requirements and the capacity of knowledge that would be required to finish that task.
-
Specification
This step makes sure that the analyst officially documents requirements in the report and defines each of the requirements. This step also ensures that the requirements are numbered in an ascending or descending fashion as per priority. This numbering ensures that each individual requirement can be easily tracked for their development throughout the end of the lifecycle. After all of this, a final check is made to make certain that all these tests can be performed.
Role of the client
We must emphasize the fact that the client already knows about the project bottlenecks and pain points hence they would be the best fit that can help us in arranging the requirements as per their priority in an ascending or descending order. This will not only loosen up things for the team but also inculcate a sense of priority in them.
-
Verification
This is the last step of the requirement gathering process. This step inculcates an end verification of the document necessities along with communicating with the clients to make sure that their expectations are being met. The requirements once again get processed over to the clients and need to be formally approved. This step will begin the onset of the business analyst jotting down the test cases.
Role of the client
The client has a major role to play in this. During the formal review and end acceptance, they can once again recheck for any updates on their requirements. This is also the step wherein the client helps in communicating the end needs and can give preliminary assets for building the user test cases.
Conclusion
Requirement gathering is a collaborative process that must be done in a combination with both the client’s knowledge and expectations along with the analysis and experience of an analyst. Both the teams must gain the best of two worlds to gather good requirements as that is the foundation pillar of a good deliverable and successful software release.
