Unearthing Business Requirements

Part III

Elicitation in Practice

Historically, organizations have not understood the value of investing significant amounts of time and cost to involve the customer, end-user, and business process owner throughout the project life cycle. Indeed, the pressure to deliver projects faster has never been greater. However, we are beginning to understand the consequences of abbreviated requirements activities. Hooks and Farry¹ state that more than 80 percent of all product defects are introduced in the requirements phase. Professional business analysts employ targeted elicitation practices to improve requirements quality and eliminate requirements defects early in the project life cycle.

The business analyst needs to select elicitation activities that ...