Question

In the business world, which elicit requirements techniques do you think would work best in eliciting requirements from a sponsor, an everyday user, or a stakeholder that engages in these requirements occasionally but when they do their results affect the entire business.

Answer 1

The key techniques to eliciting requirements from a sponsor, an everyday user, or a stakeholder in the business world are as follows:

Interviews: The most flexible and direct tool but can cause a lot of misunderstanding and failure compared to other techniques.

Questionnaires: This is a good tool but has the limitation of getting answers specifically to the questions. The information is collected but the free flow of thoughts is restricted by the scope of the question.

Observation: Observation is an excellent tool to understand users requirement and behavior. You can examine their environment and get clues of what they are lacking. You can create a diary or log of the observations.

Role-playing: This technique is used to elicit information from users by putting them in probable situations and letting them act out the situation. Then you can brainstorm around the situation and the experience.

Workshops: Workshop is an excellent tool to elicit information but very expensive and needs proper planning. First, you must plan the participants of the workshop. The workshop should include end users or stakeholders. You can share the agenda and details of the workshop with the participants. The workshop can introduce innovative games and then you can observe and analyze data for patterns.

To sum up you can use either or a combination of a few of the above to elicit the requirement of the sponsor, end-user, and stakeholder in a business world.