Business Analysis Quarter

Business Analysis Quarter (hereinafter, the Quarter) is the second of four lectures of Project Quadrivium (hereinafter, the Quadrivium):

• The Quarter is designed to introduce its learners to enterprise analysis, or, in other words, to concepts related to analyzing enterprise data in order to create enterprise information or, in other words, information needed for enterprise design; and
• The Quadrivium examines concepts of administering various types of enterprises known as enterprise administration as a whole.

The Quadrivium is the first of seven modules of Septem Artes Administrativi, which is a course designed to introduce its learners to general concepts in business administration, management, and organizational behavior.

Lecture outline

The predecessor lecture is Data Gathering Quarter.

Concepts

1. Business analysis. The set of tasks and techniques used to work as a liaison among stakeholders in order to understand the structure, policies and operations of an organization, and recommend solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.
   • Business need. A type of high-level business requirement that is a statement of a business objective, or an impact the solution should have on its environment.
2. Business requirement. A higher level business rationale that, when addressed, will permit the organization to increase revenue, avoid costs, improve service, or meet regulatory requirements.
   • Requirement. (1) A condition or capability needed by a stakeholder to solve a problem or achieve an objective; (2) A condition or capability that must be met of possessed by a solution or solution component to satisfy a contract, standard, specification or other formally imposed documents; (3) A documented representation of a condition or capability as in 1) or 2).
   • Functional requirement(s). The product capabilities, or things the product must do for its users.
   • Non-functional requirement(s). The quality attributes, design and implementation constraints, and external interfaces that the product must have.
   • Business requirements document. A requirements package that describes business requirements and stakeholder requirements (it documents requirements of interest to the business, rather than documenting business requirements).

Methods

• Analyst. A generic name for a role with the responsibilities of developing and managing requirements. Other names include business analyst, business integrator, requirements analyst, requirements engineer, and systems analyst.
• Baseline. A point-in-time view of requirements that have been reviewed and agreed upon to serve as a basis for further development.
• Black box test. A test written without regard to how the software is implemented. These tests show only what the expected input and outputs will be.
• Checklist. A quality control technique. They may include a standard set of quality elements that reviewers use for requirements verification and requirements validation or be specifically developed to capture issues of concern to the project.
• Design constraints. Software requirements that limit the options available to the system designer.
• Document analysis. Document analysis is a means to elicit requirements of an existing system by studying available documentation and identifying relevant information.
• Elicitation. An activity within requirements development that identifies sources for requirements and then uses elicitation techniques (e.g., interviews, prototypes, facilitated workshops, documentation studies) to gather requirements from those sources.
• Exploratory prototype. A prototype developed to explore or verify requirements.
• Feature. A cohesive bundle of externally visible functionality that should align with business goals and objectives. Each feature is a logically related grouping of functional requirements or non-functional requirements described in broad strokes.
• Focus group. A focus group is a means to elicit ideas and attitudes about a specific product, service or opportunity in an interactive group environment. The participants share their impressions, preferences and needs, guided by a moderator.
• Gap analysis. A comparison of the current state and desired future state of an organization in order to identify differences that need to be addressed.
• Horizontal prototype. A prototype that shows a shallow, and possibly wide, view of the system's functionality, but which does not generally support any actual use or interaction.
• Included use case. A use case composed of a common set of steps used by multiple use cases.
• Iteration. A process in which a deliverable (or the solution overall) is progressively elaborated upon. Each iteration is a self-contained "mini-project" in which a set of activities are undertaken, resulting in the development of a subset of project deliverables. For each iteration, the team plans its work, does the work, and checks it for quality and completeness. (Iterations can occur within other iterations as well. For example, an iteration of requirements development would include elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation activities.)
• Observation. Observation is a means to elicit requirements by conducting an assessment of the stakeholder’s work environment.
• Peer review. A validation technique in which a small group of stakeholders evaluates a portion of a work product to find errors to improve its quality.
• Product backlog. A set of user stories, requirements or features that have been identified as candidates for potential implementation, prioritized, and estimated.
• Product scope. The features and functions that characterize a product, service or result.
• Product vision statement. A brief statement or paragraph that describes the why, what, and who of the desired software product from a business point of view.
• Product. A solution or component of a solution that is the result of a project.
• Prototype. A partial or preliminary version of the system.
• Quality assurance. Activities performed to ensure that a process will deliver products that meet an appropriate level of quality.
• Quality attribute. The subset of nonfunctional requirements that describes properties of the software's operation, development, and deployment (e.g., performance, security, usability, portability, and testability).
• Quality. The degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfills requirements.
• Requirement attribute. Metadata related to a requirement used to assist with requirements development and management.
• Requirement defect. An error in requirements caused by incorrect, incomplete, missing, or conflicting requirements.
• Requirements allocation. The process of apportioning requirements to subsystems and components (i.e., people, hardware, and software).
• Requirements iteration. An iteration that defines requirements for a subset of the solution scope. For example, an iteration of requirements would include identifying a part of the overall product scope to focus upon, identifying requirements sources for that portion of the product, analyzing stakeholders and planning how to elicit requirements from them, conducting elicitation techniques, documenting the requirements, and validating the requirements.
• Requirements management plan. A description of the requirements management process.
• Requirements management tool. A software tool that stores requirements information in a database, captures requirements attributes and associations, and facilitates requirements reporting.
• Requirements management. The activities that control requirements development, including requirements change control, requirements attributes definition, and requirements traceability.
• Requirements model. A representation of requirements using text and diagrams. Requirements models can also be called user requirements models or analysis models and can supplement textual requirements specifications.
• Requirements package. A requirements package is a set of requirements grouped together in a document or presentation for communication to stakeholders.
• Requirements risk mitigation strategy. An analysis of requirements-related risks that ranks risks and identifies actions to avoid or minimize those risks.
• Requirements signoff. Formal approval of a set of requirements by a sponsor or other decision maker.
• Requirements trace matrix. A matrix used to track requirements' relationships. Each column in the matrix provides requirements information and associated project or software development components.
• Requirements traceability. The ability to identify and document the lineage of each requirement, including its derivation (backward traceability), its allocation (forward traceability), and its relationship to other requirements.
• Requirements validation. The work done to ensure that the stated requirements support and are aligned with the goals and objectives of the business.
• Requirements verification. The work done to evaluate requirements to ensure they are defined correctly and are at an acceptable level of quality. It ensures the requirements are sufficiently defined and structured so that the solution development team can use them in the design, development and implementation of the solution.
• Requirements workshop. A requirements workshop is a structured meeting in which a carefully selected group of stakeholders collaborate to define and or refine requirements under the guidance of a skilled neutral facilitator.
• Solution requirement. A characteristic of a solution that meets the business and stakeholder requirements. May be subdivided into functional and non-functional requirements.
• Solution scope. The set of capabilities a solution must deliver in order to meet the business need. See also scope.
• Solution. A solution meets a business need by resolving a problem or allowing an organization to take advantage of an opportunity.
• Stakeholder requirement. Stakeholder requirements are statements of the needs of a particular stakeholder or class of stakeholders. They describe the needs that a given stakeholder has and how that stakeholder will interact with a solution. Stakeholder requirements serve as a bridge between business requirements and the various categories of solution requirements.
• Stated requirements. A requirement articulated by a stakeholder that has not been analyzed, verified, or validated. Stated requirements frequently reflect the desires of a stakeholder rather than the actual need.
• Survey. A survey administers a set of written questions to stakeholders in order to collect responses from a large group in a relatively short period of time.
• Systems requirements specification. A requirements document written primarily for Implementation SMEs describing functional and nonfunctional requirements.
• Throw-away prototype. A prototype used to quickly uncover and clarify interface requirements using simple tools, sometimes just paper and pencil. Usually discarded when the final system has been developed.
• Transition requirement(s). A classification of requirements that describe capabilities that the solution must have in order to facilitate transition from the current state of the enterprise to the desired future state, but that will not be needed once that transition is complete.
• Use case diagram. A type of diagram defined by UML that captures all actors and use cases involved with a system or product.
• Use case. An analysis model that describes the tasks that the system will perform for actors and the goals that the system achieves for those actors along the way.
• User acceptance test. Test cases that users employ to judge whether the delivered system is acceptable. Each acceptance test describes a set of system inputs and expected results.
• User requirements document. A requirements document written for a user audience, describing user requirements and the impact of the anticipated changes on the users.
• User story. A high-level, informal, short description of a solution capability that provides value to a stakeholder. A user story is typically one or two sentences long and provides the minimum information necessary to allow a developer to estimate the work required to implement it.
• User. A stakeholder, person, device, or system that directly or indirectly accesses a system.
• Validated requirement. A requirement that has been demonstrated to deliver business value and to support the business goals and objectives.
• Validation. The process of checking a product to ensure that it satisfies its intended use and conforms to its requirements. Validation ensures that you built the correct solution. Also see requirements validation.
• Verification. The process of checking that a deliverable produced at a given stage of development satisfies the conditions or specifications of the previous stage. Verification ensures that you built the solution correctly. Also see requirements verification.
• Verified requirements. Requirements that have been shown to demonstrate the characteristics of requirements quality and as such are cohesive, complete, consistent, correct, feasible, modifiable, unambiguous, and testable.
• Vertical prototype. A prototype that dives into the details of the interface, functionality, or both.
• Walkthrough. A type of peer review in which participants present, discuss, and step through a work product to find errors. Walkthroughs of requirements documentation are used to verify the correctness of requirements. See also structured walkthrough.
• Work product. A document or collection of notes or diagrams used by the business analyst during the requirements development process.

Practices

The successor lecture is Solution Design Quarter.