Requirements Elicitation: A Step-by-Step Approach to Defining the Right Requirements
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Requirements Elicitation: A Step-by-Step Approach to Defining the Right Requirements
The success of any new product or project hinges on a simple, yet challenging task: collecting requirements. When done well in a carefully controlled process that lives up to the more aptly named eliciting requirements, it leads to a product or project that meets everyone’s expectations. When done poorly in a haphazard manner, it results in costly rework, missed deadlines, and a final delivery that fails to satisfy anyone.
The process of gathering input from a diverse group of stakeholders—each with their own priorities and perspectives—poses multiple risks. Time and costs can quickly spiral, and the danger of missing a critical requirement is ever-present. This article explores the basics and benefits of following a systematic process for requirements elicitation.
The High Cost of Unstructured Requirements Collection
Product and project leads are under pressure to get requirements complete before anything else begins. Without a systematic process designed to ensure intended outcomes, project or program success is exposed to these significant risks:
- Wasted Time and Resources: Ad-hoc soliciting, eliciting, tracking, and organizing requirements in documents and spreadsheets is incredibly time-consuming and prone to error. This inefficiency directly translates to higher project costs and slower time-to-market.
- The Risk of Missing Requirements: A disorganized process makes it easy for critical requirements to fall through the cracks. Discovering these gaps late in the development cycle leads to expensive changes and frustrating delays.
- Incomplete Stakeholder Input: Failing to identify and engage all relevant stakeholders—from internal teams like Sales and Product Management to external partners like customers and partners—can result in a product that is misaligned with market needs or technical constraints.
The key takeaway: An ad-hoc approach to collecting requirements is not just inefficient; it’s a direct threat to your project’s success.
How to Systematically Elicit Requirements: A 5-Step Process
To mitigate these risks, adopt a structured approach. These steps will help you gather, organize, and track requirements with greater clarity and efficiency.
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Step 1: Define the Project or Project Scope and Objectives
Before you elicit a single requirement, ensure everyone has a shared understanding of the goals. What problem are you trying to solve? Who are the users, and what are their priorities? What does success look like? What industry or corporate standards will require documentation to demonstrate compliance?
A clear project charter or vision document is essential for keeping all subsequent requirements aligned with the core objectives. This document should be a living resource, regularly revisited, and carefully updated in a controlled manner based on learning throughout the process.
Step 2: Identify and Map Your Stakeholders
A stakeholder is anyone with an interest in or influence on your product or project. Missing input from a key stakeholder is a common point of failure. The lists below are some common stakeholders but are not an exhaustive list.
- Internal Stakeholders: Product management, sales, marketing, engineering, quality assurance, and executive leadership.
- External Stakeholders: Customers, end-users, suppliers, partners, and regulatory bodies.
Create a stakeholder map to categorize individuals and groups based on their level of influence and interest. This helps you prioritize engagement and tailor your communication strategy.
Step 3: Choose Your Elicitation Techniques
There is no one-size-fits-all method for collecting requirements. Use a mix of techniques to gather comprehensive information:
- Interviews: One-on-one conversations are great for understanding individual needs and complex details.
- Observation: Ethnographic studies and usability analysis can expose current problems or identify opportunities that a product might solve, but that users and other stakeholders might not be able to see or articulate.
- Focus Groups: Facilitated group sessions are effective for brainstorming, resolving conflicts, and building consensus among stakeholders.
- Surveys: Use questionnaires to gather input from many stakeholders efficiently, as long as the requestions are articulated to avoid injecting bias and responses are interpreted carefully.
- Document Analysis: Review existing business plans, market analysis, and technical specifications to extract relevant requirements.
All of these techniques are powerful but can be risky in the hands of inexperienced personnel.
Step 4: Document and Organize Requirements in a Centralized System
As you gather requirements, you must organize them in a way that is accessible, clear, and traceable. A scattered process makes it impossible to see dependencies, track changes, or ensure complete coverage.
The most important part of this step is moving away from manual methods and toward a single source of truth that applies a systematic approach and automation to maintain control and visibility.
Step 5: Review, Refine, and Validate
Collecting requirements is not a one-time event. It’s an iterative process, and work products can span generations of products and product lines. Once documented, requirements must be reviewed by stakeholders to ensure they are clear, accurate, and complete. This feedback loop is critical for refining the product or project definition and gaining formal sign-off before development begins.
Other Key Considerations
What is the difference between collecting, gathering, and eliciting requirements?
While often used interchangeably, “gathering” or “collecting” can imply simply accumulating information sitting around waiting to be picked up. “Eliciting” suggests a systematic and organized process of soliciting, documenting, and managing requirements from various sources to build a complete and validated set.
How can I ensure I haven’t missed any key stakeholders?
Start by brainstorming all possible groups and individuals affected by the project, both inside and outside your organization. Review past projects of a similar nature to see who was involved. A key practice is to ask the stakeholders you’ve already identified, “Who else should we talk to?”
What’s the biggest risk of a poor requirements collection process?
The biggest risk is building the wrong product. Missing or misunderstood requirements can lead to a final product that doesn’t meet customer needs or business goals, rendering the entire development effort a waste of time and money.
Can AI help speed up the process?
Yes, Generative AI can be useful in suggesting requirements and uncovering gaps in requirements already identified. Be prepared to store suggestions that are outside the scope of the current project for possible use in future ones.
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Use the Right Tool to Elicit Requirements
To ensure that your process for eliciting requirements for complex products or projects goes smoothly, use a modern tool designed specifically for that purpose. Jama Connect® is designed to address the core pain points of requirements elicitation by providing a collaborative, single platform accessible to all your stakeholders from the start through the end of your project, as well as across product lines and product generations
With Jama Connect, you can:
- Centralize Everything: Create, review, validate, and verify all requirements in one place, eliminating the chaos of documents and spreadsheets.
- Improve Stakeholder Collaboration: Bridge silos between teams and provide all stakeholders with real-time visibility into goals, progress, and interdependencies.
- Enhance Requirement Quality: Use the Jama Connect Advisor™ add-on to Jama Connect to author and analyze requirements for clarity and consistency against industry standards, including the EARS syntax. Natural language processing (NLP) helps you write better requirements from the start, avoiding ambiguity that leads to costly rework later.
- Ensure Traceability: Easily track relationships between requirements, test cases, and risk analyses to understand the impact of any change.
Don’t let scattered documents and manual tracking derail your requirements elicitation activity. A systematic approach supported by the right tool is the key to developing complex products successfully.
Ready to streamline your requirements elicitation process?
Schedule a demo of Jama Connect today!
Note: This article was drafted with the aid of AI. Additional content, edits for accuracy, and industry expertise by Mark Levitt and Sarah Crary Gregory.
Member of the Industrial Innovation Committee of the IEEE Requirements Engineering Conference at IEEE
Representative invited talks:
* Keynote, ACM SigSoft Industry Summit, Beijing, China. (17 September, 2016)
* "It Depends: Heuristics for Common-Enough Requirements Practice" REFSQ'16, Gothenberg, Sweden (March 2016)
* "Writing Secure Requirements: It's Simple if you Ignore the Complexity" Intel Software Professionals Conference (SWPC), Guadalajara, Mexico. (October 2016)
* "How Common is Common Enough?" REFSQ'15, Esesn, Germany (March 2014)
* Keynote, ACM SigSoft Industry Summit, Beijing, China. (17 September, 2016)
* "It Depends: Heuristics for Common-Enough Requirements Practice" REFSQ'16, Gothenberg, Sweden (March 2016)
* "Writing Secure Requirements: It's Simple if you Ignore the Complexity" Intel Software Professionals Conference (SWPC), Guadalajara, Mexico. (October 2016)
* "How Common is Common Enough?" REFSQ'15, Esesn, Germany (March 2014)
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