Developing products and services that meet the expectations of users and customers is critical to success. Technology-oriented enterprises face strong competition on the basis of quality. Requirement analysis is the foundation of a user-centred approach, creating products that appeal and meet user needs.
Requirement analysis is basically an organization's understanding (in writing) of a customer or potential client's system requirements prior to any actual design or development work. Good requirement analysis practices reduce project risk and help the project running smoothly
User requirements analysis provides precise descriptions of the content, functionality and quality demanded by prospective users. For the identification of user needs the user perspective must be assumed and result in:
Specification of functional requirements. The goals users want to reach and the tasks they intend to perform with the new product or service must be determined, including information needed, modes of access, transactions, modifications to this information.
The distinction between tasks and activities is crucial. Activities describe user procedures (also called user action), i.e. command sequences for performing tasks. Tasks describe the goals of the user with as little reference as possible to the detailed technical realization of the information product. It is often misleading to transfer action sequences using existing paper based information products to electronic information products. Electronic information products may provide new methods for browsing, selecting and visualizing data which induce very different activities of the user.
Understanding the tasks involves abstraction of why the user performs certain activities, what his constraints and preferences are, and how the user would make trade-offs between different products.
Non-functional requirements: Specification of non-functional requirements
includes the description of user characteristics such as prior knowledge
and experiences, special needs of elderly and handicapped persons,
subjective preferences, and the description of the environment, in
which the product or service will be used. For electronic information
products and services new business models, legal issues, intellectual
property rights, security and privacy requirements be an issue. Further
non-functional requirements must be derived from cost constraints.
Main techniques
Traditional methods of Requirements Elicitation included stakeholder
interviews and focus group studies. Other methods like flowcharting
of business processes and the use of existing documentation like user
manuals, organizational charts, process models and systems or process
specifications, on-site analysis, interviews with end-users, market
research and competitor analysis were also used extensively in Requirements
Elicitation.