Detailed Course Outline
Course benefits:
This course prepares candidates to sit the examination for the Certificate in Requirements Engineering.
This certificate is concerned with one of the major areas of business analysis work, producing a well-organised and clearly-defined set of requirements.
The syllabus is structured around a five part framework for Requirements Engineering which is applied to a project initiated by an approved business case. The five elements of the framework are Requirements Elicitation, Requirements Analysis, Requirements Validation, Requirements Documentation and Requirements Management.
The syllabus requires that the candidate should be able to describe the objectives and techniques within each element of the framework.
Organisations can submit their own approaches for accreditation, provided that they show how all aspects of the syllabus are handled in their proposed approach.
Candidates may be expected to apply any of the techniques defined in the syllabus in the examination for this certificate.
This course is aimed at Business Analysts who wish to gain the BCS Certificate in Requirements Engineering. Systems analysts and business users will also benefit from attending the course.
There are no specific pre-requisites for entry to the examination, however candidates should be suitably prepared and possess the appropriate skills and knowledge to fulfil the objectives.
Holders of the BCS Certificate in Requirements Engineering should be able to:
- Explain the importance of linking requirements to the Business Case.
- Describe the roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders in the requirements engineering processs.
- Explain the use of a range of requirements elicitation techniques and the relevance of the techniques to business situations.
- Analyse, prioritise and organise elicited requirements.
- Document requirements.
- Identify problems with requirements and explain how requirements documentation may be improved.
- Create a model of the features required from a system.
- Interpret a model of the data requirements for an information system.
- Describe the principles of Requirements Management and explain the importance of managing requirements.
- Describe the use of tools to support Requirements Engineering.
- Explain the process and stakeholders involved in Requirements Validation.
1. Introduction to Requirements Engineering
1.1 Framework for Requirements Engineering.
- Requirements Engineering activities – Elicitation, Analysis, Validation, Documentation, Management
- Rationale for Requirements Engineering and the problems with requirements
- The importance of requirements planning and estimating
1.2 The business rationale and inputs
- The business case
- Terms of Reference / Project Initiation Document (PID)
2. Hierarchy of Requirements
2.1 Building the hierarchy
2.2 Categories of requirements within the hierarchy
- General business requirements, including legal and business policy
- Technical policy requirements
- Functional requirements
- Non-functional requirements, including performance, usability, access, security, archiving, back up and recovery, availability, robustness
3. Stakeholders in the Requirements process
3.1 Project stakeholders
- Project Manager
- Business Analyst
- Developer
3.2 Business stakeholders
- Project Sponsor
- Subject matter expert
- End users and managers
3.3 External stakeholders
- Customers
- Regulators
- Suppliers - products and services
4. Requirements Elicitation
4.1 Knowledge types - tacit and non-tacit
4.2 Elicitation techniques:
- Interviews
- Workshops
- Observation:
- Formal/informal
- Shadowing
- Prototyping
- Scenarios
- Document Analysis
- Special Purpose records
- Questionnaires
4.3 Understanding the applicability of techniques
5. Use of models in Requirements Engineering
5.1 The purpose of modelling requirements
- Generating questions
- Cross-checking for consistency and completeness
- Defining business rules
5.2 Modelling the business context for the system
5.3 Developing a model to represent the system processing requirements
5.4 Interpreting a data model
6. Requirements Documentation
6.1 Documentation styles and levels of definition
- User stories
- Use cases
- Requirements Catalogue
6.2 Requirements Catalogue
- Identifier
- Name
- Description
- Acceptance criteria
- Source/Owner
- Rationale/Benefits
- Non-functional requirementsv
- Priority
- Related requirements/documents
- Author
- Version control/status
- Change history
7. Requirements Analysis
7.1 Prioritising and packaging requirements for delivery
7.2 Organising requirements
7.3 Ensuring well-formed requirements
- Removing overlapping requirements
- Identifying and negotiating conflicts between requirements
- Removing ambiguity
- Ensuring feasibility
- Ensuring testability
7.4 Prototyping requirements
7.5 Verifying requirements
8. Requirements Validation
8.1 Agreeing the requirements document
8.2 Types of reviews
8.3 Stakeholders and their areas of concern
9.Requirements Management
9.1 Dealing with changing requirements
9.2 The importance of traceability
- Vertical traceability (to business objectives)
- Horizontal traceability (from origin to deliver)
9.3 Traceability and ownership
9.4 Requirements Engineering support tools
The course comprises short and focused lecture sessions with exercises to practise appropriate techniques. Discussion of the problems and issues experienced by attendees will be encouraged.
The format for the examination is a one hour written (open book) examination based on a business scenario with 15 minutes reading time. Candidates who are awarded a pass for the examination are awarded the BCS Certificate in Requirements Engineering.