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Tag: Babok

BABOK's seven review types ordered from most formal to least, each cell marked on two questions, planned session and individual preparation by the reviewer. Pass around answers no to the first and yes to the second, exactly like the desk check.

Pass Around

Goal A pass around puts several independent reviewers in front of the same text and reports what each of them read in it. A single reading has nothing to compare …

BABOK's seven review types ordered from most formal to least, each cell marked on two questions, planned session and individual preparation by the reviewer. The formal walkthrough answers yes to both, like the two other formal reviews.

Formal Walkthrough

Goal The formal walkthrough is a formal technique: it uses the individual review and team consolidation activities often seen in inspection, and walkthroughs, BABOK …

Two blue entry arrows each carry their goal, their question and their completion criterion: exploration asks « what should be built? », it is done when the ambiguity is gone and produces a decision; experimentation asks « does the proposed design hold? », it is done when the proposal is judged adequate or inadequate and produces a verdict. Both enter a single box, the mock-up, of zero residual value by design, carrying the five omissions the discard licenses: no architecture, no error handling, no security, no persistence, no tests. A single green arrow leaves it, the knowledge gained, written down before the destruction, and it lands in the specification. An orange arrow runs down to a drawn bin: the artefact is destroyed on the day of the session itself, a planned destruction announced from the start.

Throw-away Prototyping

Goal Throw-away prototyping settles an open question about what should be built, at the lowest cost and before the commitment. The team builds an artefact, puts it …

A prototype sits on the left. Two branches leave it in parallel, one upward and one downward. Neither leads into the other. The upper branch reaches the gate that asks what becomes of the artefact, and that gate opens onto two exits: thrown away to throw-away prototyping, grown to evolutionary prototyping. The lower branch reaches the gate that asks what someone does with the artefact, and that gate opens onto four exits: read to storyboarding, operated to paper prototyping, executed to simulation and modelled to process modelling. That last exit is drawn in grey, outside the family's band.

Prototyping

Goal Prototyping builds an early model of the final result, at a moment when correcting it still costs little. BABOK gives it four jobs: to elicit and validate needs …

A filled-in persona card: Nadia Perret, 34, self-employed, insured with a Swiss caisse-maladie. Three numbered goals with the first one in orange, her frustrations and preferred channel alongside and the research base (12 interviews, survey of 340 insured members) noted at the foot of the card.

Personas

Purpose Personas replace the private assumptions each member of a team forms about the user with a small number of documented, shared and verifiable archetypes. Each …

A paper-prototyping session seen from above. The participant puts a finger on a sheet and thinks aloud, the facilitator hands over the task card, the human computer swaps the sheet and says nothing, the observer logs one problem per card. A loop runs from the finger to the swapped sheet, to the logged hesitation, to the sheet corrected in pen, then on to the next participant.

Paper Prototyping

Goal Paper prototyping establishes whether a chosen but not-yet-built design holds up on contact with a real user. The answer arrives in an hour, in the form of …

Vertical chain of six why/because pairs starting from 160 of 500 processed applications that missed the 30-day deadline, descending to the highlighted root cause, an accountability for regulatory monitoring that no role holds, then on to the corrective action and its three-month deadline.

Five Whys

Purpose The technique answers a single question: where to fix things so the problem stops coming back. An organisation that treats the visible effect of a failure …

The increments of an evolutionary prototype: v0, v1, v2 and then production, each one passing through stakeholder use, which defines the next; an unbroken band runs under the whole chain, the quality floor (architecture, security, data protection, tests, operations), which starts at increment zero and carries the marker "paid here". The drawing shows no bin and no cleanup step anywhere.

Evolutionary Prototyping

Goal Evolutionary prototyping exists to deliver a working solution while its requirements are still being discovered. The elicitation instrument is the real use of a …

Diagram of choosing an elicitation: a need opens onto three parallel columns, collaborative (direct interaction with stakeholders), research (systematic study of existing sources) and experiments (controlled test). The three converge on a single elicitation activity plan, from which an arrow leads to the confirmation of the results.

Elicitation

Goal Elicitation serves to obtain the information the analysis will use, and its first decision bears on where that information comes from: which origin will yield …

Six panels answering the question "What decides?". Categories agreed in advance point to grouping, a strict order to ranking, a resource limit fixed in advance to time boxing and budgeting, an agreement between stakeholders to negotiation, a tally of votes to dot voting and proximity to a written goal to the bullseye. Each panel names the deliverable: labelled categories, an ordered list from 1 to N, a scope that fits under the ceiling, an agreed set, a ranked tally and rings from centre to edge. Grouping, ranking, time boxing and budgeting and negotiation are the BABOK's four approaches; dot voting and the bullseye are not among them.

Prioritization

Goal Prioritization determines the relative importance of business analysis information. A list longer than the capacity forces the organisation to say where it …

Dependency chain of the six financial-analysis measures. On the left, total cost of ownership feeds the cost side of a central block, cost-benefit analysis, which carries the period-by-period cash-flow table. Four arrows leave it toward return on investment, net present value, the internal rate of return and the payback period, each labelled with the question that measure answers. Net present value and the internal rate of return are marked as discounting the flows.

Financial Analysis

Goal Financial analysis judges an investment option on its financial viability, its stability and the realisation of the benefits it promises. It brings together the …

The chain of the four elements of a business case: the need tied to a business objective, the measurable desired outcomes set before any alternative, the assessment of the alternatives including do nothing on four axes (scope; feasibility; assumptions, risks and constraints; financial analysis and value) then the recommended solution, with a return arrow from the desired outcomes to the measurement of the delivered solution.

Business Cases

Goal A business case is the answer to a decision question: is this change worth what it costs and in what form? The BABOK defines it as a justification for a course …