How to Gather Business Requirement in Five Steps

In ReqStudio the requirements collection process is split into five easy steps. Those steps are discussed in detail here.

Areas

We’ll be doing the area identification in the first step. There are many departments and sub-departments, so the area defining is the most important thing because it is going to have more specific objectives. Full look and feel of the main issue can be attained by narrowing down the different areas. The more specific the area is, the simpler it would become to extract requirements.

Let’s first describe the area before narrowing it down it is a unit that has similar process and business data obligations. If you have a business, you will have various departments in it, such as production development, finance, etc. Now let’s take the finance department into consideration. The name indicates it is a single department but it has various operations and can be further categorized into transactions, selling and accounting. Now the area should organize all of the associated processes and information. It seems easy to organize processes and information on a surface level but once you understand software development the particulars are very complicated. Therefore the step one is to find the area.

Business Role

The business role is related to the performance of the task and this is kept by the person in the organization who executes the tasks and manages the process. The position of the person is very important because of its role. Let’s say there are three different roles as finance manager, assistant and accountant in your finance department within your organization and these roles will be handled by three different people. Now you can combine all three individuals into one group. The person with business role will identify these roles and responsibilities. These responsibilities will help to create the security.

Business Data

Now the third step is related to business data after identifying areas and business roles that are inside the areas. As the name shows the step has to do with the data or information. This could be applied to anything that is based on people, things, events locations and market positions related to business roles. Most specifically, this data filter out the necessary need. Suppose you need to create invoice for any individual and you’ll need invoice information which is business data for creating invoice. Then you will make the invoice form based on those business data. This can be highlighted by another example if the customer has to pay the bills and he needs receipt for payment. Then for that again a form or paper needs to be filled which needs business data. This is the data that will be needed in step three. The purpose of the business data is to define the properties of the documents and forms.

Business Processes

When any function or operation on the business data is conducted it becomes business process. The main purpose of business data is to run through various tasks to become business process which will be handling different actions. Let’s understand this one through an example of finance department. In this department new invoices, documentation and other financial systems based on the business model need to be developed. Now the business data will go through different procedure to perform these tasks and this will become business processes.

  Business Rule

Business rule is the last step of gathering business requirements and it is linked with the decisions and condition that will be applied to business data and business process. On a business data there are different operations that we can run over but those processes will be carried out through some business rules. In one of the above scenarios we have discussed the example of invoice hence when you are creating it there will be some business rules that you need to consider. For example you cannot create an invoice with future date. It’s also a business rule that you cannot build an invoice for it if the product is missing in the inventory. These rules make the continuity of the business processes and business data. These are the rules we need to define related to business data and business process in the organization. They go together and the purpose of all business rules is to identify pre-conditions and post-conditions, pre-actions and post-actions that are most commonly taken in the course of business processes.

All these steps work in harmony to get the requirement for the project that needs to be developed.