Developing and Writing Testable Business Requirements For Software Development and Software Testing

COURSE 3325 | 2-DAY SESSION
Developing and Writing Testable Business Requirements For Software Development and Software Testing

Proven Processes for Development, Delivery and Support

You may have the best design and development team in the world but if you cannot communicate your needs to other departments in the organization, you are doomed to fail. If business requirements are vague, incorrect or simply incomplete you will end up with problems. Those problems will cost you time and money to correct. Learn how to manage the client from the beginning and benefit from their cooperation. Avoid project overruns of cost and time. Reduce development time, improve productivity, and prevent costly maintenance.

Gathering testable business requirements is essential to any organization and often does not keep pace with the needs of today’s users. Many products fail at the customer site and cost many hours and dollars to correct and maintain. Lack of understanding user’s needs and lack of input from key personnel and failure to implement the product in the user environment have cost company’s money and sometimes clients. Much of this cost and risk could have been prevented by improving the process from the beginning. This two-day course will proven processes and techniques that will help the students identify and improve their methods of gathering improved requirements prior to product definition, development, testing, delivery and support.

Gather Clear and Concise Business Requirements Prior to the Start

In this workshop you will discover how to better understand what users need, not their wants, overcome semantic obstacles and how to better use the resources you have available. How to identify and involve key personnel (stake holders,) where and when they are important to a project. This involvement is critical and we’ll examine the crucial steps you need to take. Learn how to set and measure milestones throughout the entire process. You’ll also learn how to apply new methodologies to create a solid strategy for gathering clear and concise business requirements prior to the start of project design.

In-Class Group Exercises

In-class exercises help you identify and examine first-hand problems that you may be experiencing. Through group effort, you and your peers will discuss ways your department or company should be handling their problems upfront and how those early stages can be improved. Specifically you will examine:

How to conduct productive meetings saving time and avoiding confusion
Who are the key people that should be included but rarely are
What contributions you should expect from team leaders
How to set milestones and measure progress in your environment
How to improve your communication skills
Assigning responsibilities and making them accountable
Developing better questioning techniques for improved clarity
Paraphrasing for better understanding
Defining and prioritizing key requirements

Key Benefits of Attending You Can Immediately Use:

Understanding the need for clear and unambiguous requirements

Decrease the maintenance costs of errors made in development

Minimize the changes that are always added after the design is started

Gain a more thorough understanding of what the customer expects the system to do in their environment

Make better use of the available resources

Design and develop a more user-friendly product from the beginning

Better manage your customers to ensure a better understanding of their needs

Set more realistic expectations with customers regarding design and delivery

Reduce costs and save time in development by reducing the amount of rework

Significantly reduce maintenance costs by structured design

Learn to set milestones during design, development and testing cycles

Stop guessing and take the time to know what is required

Conduct more effective meetings

Improve processes and measure productivity more easily

Understand how to collect and use metrics for more efficiency during the process

Improve tools for defining what are testable requirements

Extracting testable requirements from specifications

Develop more meaningful specifications

Truly understand the customer’s needs

Extracting user needs from user wants

Prevent errors in the specification

Improve communication skills

Learn how to collect and use metrics so you can plan better

Reduce development and maintenance costs

Plan and manage the System Development Life Cycle more effectively

Develop templates and checklists that work

Reduce and manage the ever present Creeping Scope

Improve project management techniques

Develop a traceability matrix to minimize re-testing efforts

Identify and involve stake holding users during the process

Improve regression testing techniques

Re-Test only what could be affected by the change

Enhance the involvement of stake holding users

Identify and remove defects early in the process

Create a more usable product first time around

Your Course Materials

As a great enhancement to your learning experience, Jim York has compiled a workbook exclusively for this course. The manual offers documentation for all the technical material presented in class, as well as other reference and resource material and an in-depth look at all class-exercises and case studies discussed. Much of this information cannot be found in any other source and will make a great reference tool when back at the office.