Part I - A Business Case for Improving Requirement Skills

1.       How critical are requirements development skills to the overall success of a software project?

2.       Software project success rate trends.

3.       Common challenges facing requirements management.

4.       What you should know about requirements errors.

5.       Ten unavoidable truths about software requirements.

Part II – Understanding Software Requirements

1.       Who gathers requirements?

2.       What is the role of the requirements gatherer?

3.       Sources of requirements.

4.       What is a requirement?

a.       PMI© definition

b.      iEEE© definition

5.       Domain, Problem Space, Solution Space

6.       What a requirement isn’t!

7.       Types of requirements:

a.       Governing requirements

b.      Emergent requirements

c.       Component requirements

8.       Business Rules:

a.       Sources of Business Rules

9.       Parts of a requirement:

a.       The Identifier

b.      The Classifier

c.       The Description

d.      The Constraint

10.   Example Requirement

11.   Test-driven requirements.

12.   Requirement Traceability.

13.   Some common ways to write requirements:

a.       Natural form

b.      Formal form

c.       Use cases

d.      User stories

e.      Planguage

14.   What to do with unknown requirements.

Part III – How to structure software requirements documents

1.       Survey of software project types.

2.       Documentation Audiences.

3.       Documentation and Trust.

4.       How much time is typically spent on Requirements?

5.       How to speed up the requirements process.

6.       How to structure requirement documents.

Part IV - A requirements baseline development framework

1.       A Process for gathering requirements:

a.       Elicitation

b.      Analysis

c.       Specification

d.      Validation

2.       Requirements elicitation.

3.       Requirements analysis.

a.       Prioritizing requirements:

                                                               i.      Risk driven prioritization

                                                             ii.      Critical path prioritization

                                                            iii.      Strategic prioritization

4.       Requirements specification.

a.       HLA, SRS, SDD, COO

5.       Requirements validation.

6.       Requirement “baseline” approval.

7.       The approval process.

PART V – After the baseline

1.       Triple constraint project dynamic.

2.       Managing change: Change Control.

3.       Keeping a change history log.

4.       Managing schedule impact.

Part VI - Collaboration

1.       Interviewing etiquette.

2.       Questioning techniques.

3.       Active listening.

4.       Group dynamics.

5.       Five dysfunctions of a team.

6.       Meeting etiquette.

7.       Facilitation and facilitative workshops.

8.       Negotiation.

9.       Handling special situations.

Part VII – Improving your skills going forward

1.       Four strategies to improve your requirements management performance going forward.