1. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish1 University of Palestine Faculty of Applied Engineering and Urban Planning Software Engineering Department Requirement engineering The Requirements Analyst

2. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish2 Outlines  Overview  The Requirements Analyst Role  The Making of an Analyst  Creating a Collaborative Environment

3. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish3 Overview  Explicitly or implicitly, someone performs the role of requirements analyst on every software project.  Some organizations identify specialists called business analysts to perform this function.  Synonyms for requirements analyst include systems analyst, requirements engineer, requirements manager, and simply analyst.

4. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish4 Overview  The analyst is a translator of others' perspectives into a requirements specification and a reflector of information back to other stakeholders.  The analyst helps stakeholders find the difference between what they say they want and what they really need.  He or she educates, questions, listens, organizes, and learns. It's a tough job.

5. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish5 The Requirements Analyst Role  The analyst serves as the principal conduit through which requirements flow between the customer community and the software development team.  Many other communication pathways also are used, so the analyst isn't solely responsible for information exchange on the project.

6. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish6 The Requirements Analyst Role  Requirements analyst is a project role, not necessarily a job title.  One or more dedicated specialists could perform the role, or it could be assigned to team members who also have other job functions.  These functions include project manager, product manager, subject matter expert (SME), developer, and even user.  Regardless of their other project responsibilities, analysts must have the skills, knowledge, and personality to perform the analyst role well.

7. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish7 The Analyst’s Tasks  The analyst is a communication middleman, bridging the gap between unclear customer notions and the clear specifications that guide the software team's work.  We will describes some of the typical activities that you might perform while you're wearing an analyst's hat.

8. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish8 The Analyst’s Main Tasks  Define business requirements  Identify project stakeholders and user classes  Elicit requirements  Analyze requirements  Write requirements specifications  Model the requirements  Lead requirements validation  Facilitate requirements prioritization  Manage requirements

9. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish9 The Analyst’s Main Tasks  Define business requirements it is the first step towards getting the general vision the business or funding sponsor, product manager, or marketing manager, usually participate in this task

10. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish10 The Analyst’s Main Tasks  Identify project stakeholders and user classes The vision and scope document will help you identify the important user classes and stakeholders. work with the business sponsors to select appropriate representatives for each user class. enlist the responsibilities of each representative. User representatives might hesitate to participate in requirements exploration until they know exactly what you expect from them.

11. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish11 The Analyst’s Main Tasks  Elicit requirements Requirements don't just lie around waiting for someone wearing a hat labelled "analyst" to collect them. A proactive analyst helps users articulate the system capabilities they need to meet their business objectives. You might employ information-gathering techniques selected from the following list:

12. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish12 The Analyst’s Main Tasks  Analyze requirements Derive unstated requirements. Spot conflicts, gaps and ambiguity. Clarify requirements to be suitable for use by developers.  Write requirements specifications. Analyst is responsible for writing well-organised specification which will express the shared understanding of the customer and the developer.

13. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish13 The Analyst’s Main Tasks  Model the requirements. Analysis models depict information at a higher level of abstraction than does detailed text. Models are used to maximize communication and clarity Models are usually drawn according to the conventions of a standard modelling language.  Lead requirements validation Analysts are the central participants in peer reviews of requirements documents Analysts participate in reviewing designs, code, and test cases to ensure correct requirement interpretation.

14. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish14 The Analyst’s Main Tasks  Facilitate requirements prioritization. The analyst must ensure that different user classes make sensible priority decisions.  Manage requirements After establishing the requirements baseline, the analyst's focus shifts to managing those requirements and verifying their satisfaction in the product

15. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish15 Essential Analyst Skills  Analysts need sufficient training, guidance, and experience.  Analysts need to know how to use a variety of elicitation techniques  Also how to represent information in forms other than natural-language text.  An effective analyst combines strong communication and interpersonal skills with technical and business domain knowledge.

16. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish16 Essential Analyst Skills  Listening skills.  Active listening involves:  eliminating distractions,  maintaining an attentive attitude and eye contact,  restating key points to confirm your understanding.  You should also to read between the lines to detect what the collaboraters might be hesitant to say.  Learn how your collaborators prefer to communicate.  Watch for assumptions that underlie either what you hear from others or your own interpretation.

17. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish17 Essential Analyst Skills  Interviewing and questioning skills.  Most requirements input comes through discussions.  You need to ask the right questions to surface essential requirements information.  For example, users naturally focus on the system's normal, expected behaviours. However, much code gets written to handle exceptions, so you must also consider possible error conditions and determine how the system should respond.

18. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish18 Essential Analyst Skills  Analytical skills.  An effective analyst can think at multiple levels of abstraction.  Critically evaluate the information gathered from multiple sources to:  reconcile conflicts  separate user "wants" from the user “needs”  distinguish solution ideas from requirements.

19. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish19 Essential Analyst Skills  Facilitation skills. The ability to facilitate requirements elicitation workshops is a necessary analyst capability. A good facilitator has strong questioning, observational, and facilitation skills  Observational skills. An observant analyst will detect comments that might turn out to be important. By watching a user perform his job or use a current application, a good observer can detect details that the user might not mention. Strong observational skills sometimes expose new areas for elicitation discussions.

20. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish20 Essential Analyst Skills  Writing skills. The principal deliverable from requirements development is a written specification that communicates information among customers, marketing, managers, and technical staff. The analyst needs to express complex ideas clearly.  Organizational skills. Analysts must work with a huge collection of disorganized information gathered during elicitation and analysis. Coping with rapidly changing information and structuring all the bits into a consistent whole, demands exceptional organizational skills and patience.

21. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish21 Essential Analyst Skills  Modeling skills. Unified Modeling Language (UML) notations should be part of every analyst's skills. The analyst will need to educate other stakeholders on the value of using these techniques and how to read them.  Interpersonal skills. An analyst should feel comfortable talking with individuals in diverse job functions. He or she might need to work with distributed virtual teams whose members are separated by geography, time zones, cultures, or native languages.

22. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish22 Essential Analyst Skills  Creativity. The analyst is not a recorder who records whatever customers say. They visualize inventive product capabilities, imagine new markets and business opportunities, think of ways to surprise and delight their customers. A really valuable analyst finds creative ways to satisfy needs that users didn't even know they had.

23. Instructore: Tasneem Darwish23 Essential Analyst Knowledge solid understanding of up to date requirements engineering techniques the ability to apply the techniques in various software development life cycles. The effective analyst has a rich tool kit of techniques available and knows when and when not to use each one. An analyst should have a sound understanding of project management, risk management, and quality engineering. Application domain knowledge is a powerful asset for an effective analyst. Analysts who understand the application domain often detect unstated assumptions and implicit requirements and can suggest ways that users could improve their business