Elicitation under BABOK® v2.0

Mathieu Gouanou's Foreword:


Review of the IIBA® BABOK® v2.0 Chapter 3 Task Matrix.


Eliciting requirements is a key task in business analysis. Because the requirements serve as the foundation for the solution to the business needs it is essential that the requirements be complete, clear, correct, and consistent. Leveraging proven means to elicit requirements will help meet these quality goals. The definition of elicitation in the dictionary (http://www.merriam webster.com/dictionary/elicit) is :

1. to draw forth or bring out (something latent or potential)
2. to call forth or draw out (as information or a response)

These definitions highlight the need to actively engage the stakeholders in defining requirements.

This chapter of the IIBA® BABOK® v2.0 includes details for eliciting business, stakeholder, solution, or transition requirements. The business analyst should understand the commonly used techniques to elicit requirements, should be able to select appropriate technique(s) for a given situation, and be knowledgeable of the tasks needed to prepare, execute and complete each technique.

Eliciting requirements is not an isolated or compartmentalized activity. Typically, requirements are identified throughout the elicitation, analysis, verification and validation activities. For example, requirements may be elicited in interviews or requirements workshops. Later, when those requirements are used to build and verify model(s), gaps in the requirements may be discovered. This will then require eliciting details of those newly identified requirements.

To fully examine and define the requirements a combination of complementary elicitation techniques is typically used. A number of factors (the business domain, the corporate culture and environment, the skills of the analyst and the requirements deliverables that will be created) guide which techniques will be used.

Elicitation deliverables depend on the elicitation techniques used, e.g., interview notes, survey responses, glossary terms, and so forth.

It is expected that at some point while performing elicitation that sufficient material will have been elicited from the business experts to allow analysis activities to begin. The combined results of all the elicitation techniques used will serve as input to building the selected analytical models. Missing, incomplete or incorrect requirements will ideally be exposed during the analysis activities, thus requiring additional elicitation.


                                           
                                              Elicitation Input/Output Diagram

Source for Business Analysis Tasks and Techniques: IIBA® BABOK® v2.0 or IIBA® BABOK® v3.0. For additional information, please visit http://www.theiiba.org.

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Business Analysis Body of Knowledge® and BABOK® are registered trademarks owned by International Institute of Business Analysis.