Tag: Requirements

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

CATWOE diagram in four concentric rings: Transformation at the centre, Customers and Actors on the inner ring, Weltanschauung on the middle ring, Owner and Environment on the outer ring.

CATWOE Analysis

Goal CATWOE analysis frames a human activity system before its content is discussed. It breaks that system into six elements and forces each one to be named: who …

Analysis chain of a card sort: the participants' raw sorts, the similarity matrix counting the card pairs filed together, then the dendrogram whose junction height marks the strength of the agreement.

Card Sorting

Goal In a card sort, users group existing pieces of content into the categories that feel natural to them, then they name those categories. The method answers a …

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 …

Five-column story map: the top row carries the themes of paying a QR-bill, linked left to right in the order of the customer's path; under each theme, stories stacked in decreasing priority; a horizontal line crosses the five columns and separates the first release from what waits.

Story Mapping

Goal The technique produces a map, a grid whose horizontal dimension carries the sequence and the grouping of the product's main steps and whose vertical dimension …

Two panels side by side: on the left a story card carrying its single sentence, on the right the same card surrounded by four items attached by the workshop, acceptance criteria, scenarios, a screen mock-up and an input and output table, plus a dashed arrow leaving the panel towards story decomposition.

Story Elaboration

Goal Story elaboration defines the detailed design and the acceptance criteria of a story, as needed to deliver a working solution. It works on one story at a time. …

Four-level decomposition tree: one solution goal branches into two MMFs, only one decomposed further into four stories, of which only one descends to acceptance criteria, highlighted in orange.

Story Decomposition

Goal The Agile Extension to the BABOK Guide gives the technique this purpose: to express a solution's requirements at the level of detail that suits, aligned with …