WEEK 3 - REQUIREMENTS GATHERING

Requirements gathering is a very important section as far as the analysis stage of the Systems Development Life Cycle is concerned. If you need to build an application for a coffee shop for instance, you cannot jump directly into the coding before you get to completely understand what the shop needs. As a keen analyser you must gather as much information as possible from your client. For example, before building the system, you must know what the shop wants from the system, what foods they want displayed on the menu and so on and so forth. Therefore analysing will start with gathering as much information as possible from the client.

As a systems analyst there are some important skills that you must have in order to gather information. You must have fact finding skills for needed for investigation of the system requirements. Good analysts are expected to learn all the details of business processes and the daily operations of the place. In order to gain credibility systems analysts must be as knowledgable as the business domain users and bring up fresh perspective to the problem. Finally based on the system requirements he/she must be able to model business processes.

THE MAIN OBJECTIVE OF REQUIREMENTS GATHERING IS TO MAKE SURE WE HAVE AL THE INFORMATION NEEDED TO DEFINE WHAT THE SYSTEM THAT WE ARE BUILDING MUST DO(read in caps lock)

If we take a deeper look into the analysis phase of the systems development Life Cycle, except for requirements gathering, there are some other ,the analysis phase must also determine system requirements, that is both the physical model and the logical model. The system requirements are prioritized and later prototyped for feasibility and discovery. Alternatives are generated and evaluated and recommendations are reviewed with the management. 

Business Process reengineering and analysis is a fundamental strategic approach to organizing the company as it streamlines the internal processes to be as efficient and effective as possible. The approach questions basic assumptions for doing business and seeks to find a better way and uses IT as BPR(Business Process Re-Engineering) enabler

System requirements define new system capabilities and constraints and the requirements are of two types: Functional and Non-Functional requirements. Functional requirements are the activities thatthe system must perform and are based on procedures and business functions. Functional requirements are documented in analysis models. Non functional requirements are the operating environment or the performance objectives and touch on issues such as usability, reliability, user-friendliness and security requirements that the system must accomplish.

The stakeholders are the people with the systems requirements and are interested in successful systems implementation. There are three types of Stakeholders namely: Users who use the system, Clients who pay for and own the system and The Technical Staff who have the responsibility of ensuring the system operates.

Since information gathering is used to understand business functions and developing system requirements, we must have the necessary techniques to enhance the accuracy of our fact finding methods. These techniques include reviewing existing reports, forms and procedure descriptions, interviewing the users and discussing processes with them, observing and documenting business processes, building prototypes, distributing and collecting questionaires, conducting joint application design(JAD) sessions and researching vendor solutions.

Finally analysts must validate system requirements to make sure that the gathered information is correct/accurate. The project manager is responsible for the quality of the system.