The requirements analyst provides the essential function of bridging the understanding and perspective gap that lies between customers and developers. A competent analyst must combine communication, facilitation and interpersonal skills with some technical and business domain knowledge. Even a dynamite programmer or a system-savvy user needs suitable preparation before acting as an analyst.
The following capabilities are particularly important:
facilitation techniques, to lead elicitation workshops;
interviewing techniques, to talk with individuals and groups about their needs;
listening skills, to understand what people say and to detect what they might be hesitant to say;
writing skills, to communicate information effectively to users, managers and technical staff;
organizational skills, to make sense of the vast array of information gathered during elicitation and analysis;
interpersonal skills, to help negotiate priorities and resolve conflicts among project stakeholders;
domain knowledge, to have credibility with user representatives and converse effectively with them;
And modeling skills, to represent requirements information in graphical forms that augment textual representations in natural language
Requirements for a software product aren’t just lying around waiting for someone wearing a hat labeled “analyst” to collect them. At best, requirements exist in the minds of users,visionaries and developers, from which they must be gently extracted and massaged into a usable form. Often, they need to be discovered with guidance from a talented analyst, who helps users understand what they really need to meet their business needs and helps developers satisfy those needs. Few project roles are more difficult than that of requirements analyst. Few are more critical.
For More in-depth info refer to the book "Software Requirements" by Karl Weigers
No comments:
Post a Comment