Overview

How do you meet your customers’ expectations and anticipate their needs without asking questions? How do you avoid bugs without thoroughly analyzing requirements in the first place? How do you deliver results without proper planning?

These questions point at typical improvement opportunities within an area of requirements gathering, analysis, and planning. My experience tells me that there are no shortcuts around these activities, so discussing them in the current section is worth considering.

The process of value creation usually starts with a dialogue between customers and non-technical representatives of an organization that fulfills the clients’ needs. When the requirements finally reach engineers, they will respond with questions, confusion, or a request for help. To make this cooperation effective, we must set certain expectations on requirements gathering to avoid the overhead of rework and communication.

Besides enhancing the process of upfront analysis, there are specific patterns and practices that I will suggest for non-technical activities to support engineering and architectural tasks. This dependency is another reason to talk about the presented topics.

Thus, we arrive at the ultimate goal of this section : enhancement of processes and practices that apply to requirements gathering, analysis, and planning. These recommendations will provide vital support for the successful delivery of ideal and working solutions to your customers.