Requirement Analysis is a critical phase in the software development lifecycle, where the project team gathers, analyzes, and defines the requirements of the software product to be developed.
Requirement analysis is the first step of software development process and lifecycle. It is about setting the scope for that project to avoid making mistakes as the project progress. This is usually a team effort, where the stakeholders and software developers determine the needs and conditions that the new software product must meet. It involves gathering, elicitating, documentating,modeling and validation of product requirement to ensure that they are clearly understood and feasible.
- Clarity and Understanding:- It helps in understanding what the stakeholders expect from the software, reducing ambiguity.
- Scope Definiton:- Clearly defines the scope of the project, which helps in preventing scope creep.
- Basis for Design and Development:- Provides a solid foundation for designing and developing the system.
- Cost and Time Estimation:- Facilitates accurate estimation of project cost, resources, and time.
- Quality Assurance:- Ensures that the final product meets the specified requirements, leading to higher customer satisfaction.
- Gathering:- This is the process of finding out who has a stake in the success of the software being developed, through interview, surveys or questionnaire, workshops, observations and document analysis.
- Elicitation:- This is where the team actively gathers detailed information about what the software needs to do from the identified stakeholders through brainstorming, focus groups and protyping.
- Documentation:- This is the process of documenting all the findings and a detailed record of what the software needs to do and the constraints within which it must operate including functional and non functional requirements, user stories and user cases.
- Analysis and Modeling:- This process involves taking a closer look at the documented requirements to make sure they are realistic and workable, From feasibilty to prioritization and modeling(data flow diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams).
- Validation:- Thiis step is about confirming that the requirements actually meet the needs of the stakeholders and the goals of the project. Through Review and Approval, Acceptance Criteria, and Traceability.It allows the development team to explore whether the ambitious goals can actually be achieved with current technology and within the constraints of the project, such as time and budget.
This type of requirement focus on what the system(software product) should do like user authentication, registration, property search and booking system.
This type of requirement focus on how the system(software product) should perform like performance, security, scalability, usablity, and reliability.
User Journeys:
The diagram above demostrates the interconnected experiences of hosts and guest in a booking system.
Acceptance criteria are conditions that a feature must meet to be accepted by the stakeholders.It must be specific and measurable and includes functional and non funcional product requirement.
- Ensure all parties have a clear understanding of feature requirements
- Help in maintaining quality and meeting user expectations
- Provide a basis for testing and validation.
- Users should be able to select available dates.
- Users should be able to confirm booking.
- Users should be able to receive a confirmation email within 2 minutes.