Many big books on software requirements and business analysis recommend dozens and dozens of practices. They’re all useful in appropriate situations, but it’s daunting to try to remember—let alone implement—the whole set consistently. However, every project should perform 20 core requirements activities. These lay a solid foundation for success and help teams efficiently and effectively elicit, analyze, specify, validate, and manage their requirements. These practices are valuable for both traditional and agile projects, regardless of the kind of product you’re building. This presentation identifies those 20 core practices and drills down into several of them. They can help project and product teams understand the business problem, engage the right participants, articulate effective solutions, communicate information among stakeholders, implement the right functionality in the right sequence, and adapt to change.

Do you have to perform all 20 of these on your project? Maybe not, but you’ll feel less pain and get better results if you do.

Learning Objectives

• Identify the 20 requirements practices that contribute most heavily to business analysis success
• Understand how to apply certain of those practices on both agile and traditional projects
• Enable you to begin a self-assessment of how to improve your team’s requirements practices

About Candase

In addition to being the Past President of IIBA Austin Chapter, Candase Hokanson is a Business Architect and PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner at ArgonDigital, a software development, professional services, and training company based in Austin, Texas. With over ten years of experience in product ownership and business analysis, Candase works with clients to identify and implement the requirements that generate the best return on investment for their projects, regardless of the development life cycle. She has also trained or coached several hundred fellow product owners and business analysts. Her current passions are understanding how to optimize agile in large enterprises and agile requirements for very technical or backend systems.