Key Questions to Ask During Software Requirement Analysis

Following are some of the common issues faced by many teams that I came across, at one or the other point, is the complaint posted by their client regarding following:

1. The team including developers and testers do not understand requirements
2. The team do not ask enough questions and require spoon feeding
3. The team makes assumptions
4. The team does a good job in coding normal use case scenario; However, they fail to take into account exception handling.

The end result of above is unhappy client, a confused team and go-fix-the-issues team management. With some research and experiments, I found some of following questions that when asked during requirement analysis phase, helps take care of most of the above issues.

1. What business need is forcing the above change? What will be the benefit to the business with above change being incorporated?
2. What business events lead to the above requirement? (Input & output data are generally used to determine the business events)
3. Perform business use case analysis
   • What is the business use case that involves above activity in alternate form?
   • How the current business processes use to get executed without the change mentioned in the requirement? How would business processes get impacted as a result of change?
   • Consider evaluating different scenarios including normal, exception and alternate cases for involved business use case

Following are some of the terminologies that may be good to know for software developers/testers:

• Business events: Any happenings taking place outside the boundary/scope of work which enters the system boundary in the form of input data set can be called as business events
• Business use case: The system response to business event can be termed as business use case
• Business process: The set of activities/tasks required to be performed in business use case can be termed as business processes
• Scenarios: A set or sequence of activities that takes place in business use case can be termed as scenario. Scenario can be normal, alternate or exception scenarios.
• Product use case: The set of activities/tasks that falls within scope of system can be termed as product use case. A product use case constitutes business use case.