Requirements Gathering Fundamentals teaches the basic of requirements gathering for the new business or system analyst. Beginning with a discussion of why requirements are important to software development projects, the course continues with a discussion of what makes requirements “good.” The challenges of effective requirements gathering are discussed as it relates to different types of requirements and different source for requirements. The course then introduces a variety of traditional elicitation techniques including interviews, workshops, brainstorming, storyboarding, role playing, and prototyping.

Discussion focuses on how to extract from stakeholders the information that they often do not know how to describe including the importance of making requirements both understandable and unambiguous as possible. Then different techniques for analyzing requirements are discussed including affinity diagrams, knowledge/mind mapping, nominal group technique, and Pareto charts.

The course finishes with a discussion of how to organization and package requirements so they are effectively communicated to various stakeholders