Recognize stakeholders, their importance and their goals
Requirements engineering establishes the path to develop the right system the right way. To make sure you are on the right track:
- All project stakeholders have to be recognized as well as their interests and goals, which might contradict each other.
Who is interested in the system under development, who does it concern, who is participating in its development both directly and indirectly? Why? What goals are stakeholders pursuing? Are there, for example, goal conflicts that have to be resolved? How large an influence does each stakeholder have? These are questions for stakeholder analysis.
To answer these questions and maintain traceability, objectiF RM offers:
- Configurable forms to gather stakeholders and their goals consistently and with structure,
- Goal diagrams – simple “and-or trees” – for mapping links between stakeholders and their goals, refining goals and deriving the first requirements from stakeholder goals,
- Evaluation of stakeholders and their goals.
Which goals and requirements refer to which stakeholders? The stakeholder form has the answer. Once you have presented a relationship between a stakeholder and their goals and requirements – in a diagram or a form – they will be saved in the real time repository of objectiF RM, redundancy-free.
Configurable queries in objectiF RM’s repository provide real-time information in a list. Would you like to have this information in Excel? No worries with objectiF RM’s Excel export feature.
Stakeholders change, goals change. That is why stakeholder analysis artifacts are subject to version control in objectiF RM. All changes can be traced thanks to the automatically generated history.
Delimit system and system context
Many projects suffer from sneaky scope creep. It causes project costs to increase and endangers deadlines. The safest way to work against this is by clearly demarcating the system and its environment early on, creating reference framework for the project team’s work and a foundation for stakeholder communication.
objectiF RM has two graphic mediums for system demarcation:
- Special system context diagrams that are methodically based on data flow plans. The advantage: Aside from the limitation of the system, they can also be used to record restrictions on the system in the form of norms, standards, legal regulations, etc, that the system is subject to.
- Classic use case diagrams, which demarcate the system by modelling interactions with users and neighboring systems.
Who interacts with the planned system, who exchanges what information and does that belong to the system context? Which restrictions is the planned system subject to? These questions can be answered with the system context diagram. Its strengths: It can be designed with images and icons, so it is recommended for stakeholder communication.
For projects where stakeholders are familiar with formal communication mediums, objectiF RM offers the use case diagram for system demarcation. Advantage: central acceptance criteria from stakeholders and the first system requirements can be recorded at a very high level.
Table: Graphic stakeholder analysis and system demarcation