Software Engineering Institute

Requirements elicitation and capture, especially for an agile development effort, requires some care. It is important to capture enough detail so that developers can implement the system, without capturing so much detail that the solution is unnecessarily constrained.

The purpose of this 2-day workshop is to capitalize on pre-existing work on requirements for the system in question; bringing information into a consistent, actionable form; filling gaps in requirements when uncovered; and paying attention to non-functional architectural drivers.

Functional requirements will be expressed in the form of features or user stories, defining not only the functionality but the reason the specified role needs it. Non-functional requirements will be expressed in terms of scenarios intended to provide definition to vaguer terms such as "availability."

Throughout the workshop, there will be periodic checks to ensure that requirements are developed to satisfy the defined roles and that there is sufficient coverage of both the operational value streams and the mission threads.

Organizations may also want to consider the one-day companion workshop, Agile Requirements Prioritization Workshop.

Participants should represent a broad spectrum of stakeholders in the desired system. Participants should also expect that the system will be developed according to Agile principles.

The workshop is intended to develop a collection of artifacts:

• List of roles
• Expected uses
• Requirements

In accord with Agile principles, the requirements will be developed to sufficient level of detail that developers can use them to design and build the system. However, the requirements will not be so detailed that they overly-constrain the design. Focus will be on the elaboration of necessary features leaving other, useful features for future elaboration.

The workshop begins with level setting on terminology and understanding of existing artifacts and then leads through a series of exercises designed to elicit:

• Expected roles
• Operational value streams/Use cases
• Mission threads supporting the value streams
• Functional requirements on the systems to support the mission threads
• Non-functional requirements to be used as architectural drivers.

Course materials include presentations and exercise materials.

Before registering for this course, it is recommended that participants are familiar with system requirements and Agile principles.

The ability to speak to some portion of the requirements for the selected system.