Scope and Requirements: Elicit, Write, Validate (2-day Seminar)

Course Category: Specialized
Course Duration: 2 day
Course Credit: 14 PDUs, 14 CDUs
Prerequisites: None

Many of the challenges we face on projects can be attributed to (1) unclear or incomplete vision and scope, (2) struggles in communicating and eliciting requirements from our stakeholders, and (3) incorrect, ambiguous and poorly written requirements.  In this two-day seminar, we focus on the front-end of the life cycle where we have the most influence on the success of our projects. You will be provided with a pragmatic approach to defining your project’s scope and eliciting, documenting, and validating requirements. You will learn the best practices for writing requirements and be provided with tools and techniques that facilitate the requirement elicitation effort and lead to well written requirements that are needed, clear, correct, and complete.

Course Objective

  • Understand Scope and how you can use it to better define your product
  • Discover methods to elicit and validate requirements
  • Learn how to write good requirements correctly and avoid writing defective requirements
  • Recognize the value of requirement attributes and how they can be used to improve the quality of your requirements
  • Understand the process, tools and techniques for requirement review and validation

Develop skills to enable you to:

  • Bound the scope of your product and manage to that scope.
  • Communicate with your stakeholders and define requirements using various elicitation techniques.
  • Work as an effective facilitator in the requirements workshop environment.
  • Write requirements according to best practices.
  • Capture attributes to enhance the understanding of the requirements and management of the requirements
  • Validate your requirements as they are written and at key milestone reviews to ensure that they needed, clear, correct, complete and defect-free

Course Outline

Day 1 – Scope Definition

  • Understanding the first step – Scope
  • Developing the components of Scope
  • Establishing the baseline: conducting a review and risk assessment

Day 2 – Eliciting, Writing and Validating Requirements

  • Gain insight into the cause and impact of requirement defects
  • Explore effective techniques to elicit requirements
    • Interviewing
    • Workshop
    • Prototyping
    • Use Cases
    • Models and Diagrams
  • Defining requirements as a group and maintaining harmony in the workshop environment
  • Writing requirements to best practices
  • Capturing requirement attributes (rationale, verification, prioritization)
  • Ensuring complete requirements and covering  all requirement categories – functional and performance, interface, operational, “-ilities” (such as reliability and supportability), physical, environmental, and design and construction categories
  • Validating and Baselining Requirements
    • Validating requirements
    • Conducting a Requirement Review
    • Creating a baseline

Intended Audience

This training is critical for those responsible for communicating, eliciting and documenting requirements. Representatives of all the product’s stakeholders will be involved in developing, reviewing, and approving requirements, and this training will benefit them and your requirement effort.

  • Business Analysts (BA)
  • Requirement Engineers (RE)
  • Subject Matter Experts (SME)
  • Program and Project Managers (PM)
  • Developers
  • Testers
  • Independent Verification and Validation (IVV) Team
  • Customers
  • Users
  • Marketing