March 9th, 2010
After the requirements elicitation meetings, you spend time compiling, analyzing, and organizing your notes so you can flesh out the requirements in more detail. This is when you finalize the glossary of business terms for the project, model business processes and use cases, generate visual diagrams, and define both the functional and non-functional requirements associated with each capability. These detailed requirements also include business rules to be enforced or screen mock-ups that give end users a sense of how the application will look. Finally, in this phase you take what you’ve defined and produce detailed requirements specifications.
In this webinar you will learn how to:
• Create sharable glossary of business terms, including actors and objects
• Model business processes, business use cases, and system use cases
• Define requirements associated with business processes and use cases
• Analyze and refine business processes and use cases as required
• Develop and publish requirements specifications and other documents
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Posted in RAMP | 1 Comment »
February 23rd, 2010
Before the project team can successfully implement requirements, they need a clear understanding of the functional, non-functional and other key characteristics of those requirements. The elicitation phase of RAMP (Requirements Analysis and Management Process) describes the activities you perform to interact with stakeholders, to discover their essential product or application needs, and gain the understanding necessary to specify them in more complete detail. While the other activities discussed in this webinar series are important, eliciting and specifying the project requirements are the real heart of your work.
In this webinar you will learn how to:
• Plan requirements elicitation meetings with end users and stakeholders
• Facilitate requirements elicitation meetings with end users and stakeholders
• Interview end users and stakeholders to identify essential business needs
• Confirm the project goals, applicable processes, and required capabilities
• Gather requirements notes, capability details, and related information
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Posted in RAMP | 5 Comments »
February 9th, 2010
Requirements Analysis and Management Process
The planning phase of RAMP sets the stage for requirements work. You collect some initial information to help scope the effort, and then you develop a plan for eliciting, specifying, and verifying requirements with project stakeholders. In some companies, all of the requirements work is completed at the beginning of the project and signed off, following a traditional or modified waterfall approach. In other companies, requirements work is performed in a series of feature-driven iterations using lean or agile development methods. You do the same tasks with either approach. The difference is primarily in when you perform your requirements work, not how you perform it. In either case, you still need to do some amount of requirements planning at the beginning of the project.
In this webinar you will learn how to:
• Define the high-level goals and business requirements for the project
• Identify the application end users and other stakeholders for the project
• Identify business processes to be impacted or transformed in the project
• Define the end-user capabilities required for each process identified
• Determine business priorities and order capabilities to be implemented
The Ravenflow RAMP Methodology describes a business-driven, best practices approach to planning, eliciting, specifying, validating and managing requirements for maximum project success. Bringing together proven business process and use case analysis techniques, the methodology enables rapid definition of essential business requirements by modeling and analyzing the processes where the solution will be used. Required capabilities are mapped from their parent business processes, then broken down into increasing levels of detail until the entire project scope has been specified. This not only ensures the requirements fully reflect business needs, but contain the detail necessary for successful implementation by the development team.
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Posted in RAMP | 10 Comments »
February 4th, 2010
Ravenflow, the leader in visual requirements definition software, today announced that it achieved record revenues in 2009, tripling the number of customers from 2008.
“2009 was a challenging year for everyone,” said Susan Boers, president and CEO of Ravenflow. “Our customers were faced with downsizing, mergers and acquisitions, and budget reductions while still having to maintain quality, increase productivity, and improve customer satisfaction. Using RAVEN has altered the way organizations look at gathering and documenting business requirements. We are pleased to announce that we doubled license revenues and experienced strong maintenance retention with Fortune 1000 customers across several key verticals, including system integrators, life sciences companies, telecommunications, and financial services organizations.”
“2009 was also a significant year for us as we introduced new, innovative products and were recognized for those achievements,” Boers said. “Major product launches included the RAVEN Express plug-in for Microsoft Word and RAVEN Visual Analyzer for IBM Rational Requirements Composer. We were honored by IBM Rational as the 2009 ISV Business Partner of the Year, and won the 2009 Jolt Productivity Award.”
“We set a new record in bringing our best practices expertise to a global community of practitioners, CIOs, and business managers,” Boers said. “Tens of thousands of people have attended our webinars, watched our YouTube videos, and conversed with our best practices experts through our RAVEN blog. And with an average of more than 500 registrants per week, our Requirements Best Practices webinars are the most watched requirements webinars on the Internet.”
Posted in Ravenflow | 3 Comments »
January 26th, 2010
The Ravenflow Requirements Analysis and Management Process (RAMP) is a business-oriented requirements methodology that describes a best practices approach to defining product, system or software application requirements for optimal implementation by your project team. With a primary objective of getting the right requirements defined up-front, the RAMP methodology has the following key characteristics:
• It reflects a clear business perspective, where the entire requirements lifecycle is driven by business, for business.
• It is process-based, where requirements are defined by analyzing the business processes where the resulting solution will be used.
• It emphasizes the importance of enabling clear communication and true collaboration between business and IT stakeholders.
• It is highly compatible with lean, agile approaches to software development and delivery.
• It is tool- and technology-agnostic, and thus can be applied successfully whether RAVEN or any other product is being used.
The Ravenflow RAMP Methodology describes a business-driven, best practices approach to planning, eliciting, specifying, validating and managing requirements for maximum project success. Bringing together proven business process and use case analysis techniques, the methodology enables rapid definition of essential business requirements by modeling and analyzing the processes where the solution will be used. Required capabilities are mapped from their parent business processes, then broken down into increasing levels of detail until the entire project scope has been specified. This not only ensures the requirements fully reflect business needs, but contain the detail necessary for successful implementation by the development team.
Watch it now!
Posted in RAMP | 3 Comments »
January 19th, 2010
Writing use cases is an important part of any product development lifecycle. However, writing “good” use cases is not enough. Effective use cases are used as a basis for system and technical requirements, test plans, and user training.
In this webinar, we’ll provide tips that will enable you to write effective use cases based on current best practices. We’ll also show you how a properly written use case can easily be used in other phases of development. We will provide some tips for developing a process that will maximize the adoption of use cases and finish with a demonstration of how RAVEN can automate the use case writing process.
Who Should Attend?
Business analysts, consultants, project managers, and anyone who is responsible for gathering and writing business and user requirements.
Topics:
• Requirements development phases
• Current requirements development methodologies
• Role of requirements throughout the lifecycle
• What are use cases?
• Benefits of use cases
• Users and stakeholders
• Use case development
• Keys to developing effective use cases
• Components of a simple use case
• How do I get started?
• Alternates and exceptions
• Business requirements and non-functional requirements
• Use case review process
• Developing technical requirements from use cases
• Requirements and testing
• Developing user test plans from use cases
Watch it now!
Posted in Business Use Cases | 1 Comment »
January 15th, 2010
Ravenflow, the leader in visual requirements definition software, today announced that it had made a substantial donation to the California Nurses Association to support immediate relief work in Haiti.
“Our hearts go out to the people of Haiti,” said Susan Boers, president and CEO of Ravenflow. “We look to support our local community to help make a difference. With the efforts of Oakland’s National Nurses United, we have decided to support the California Nurses Association because we admire and share the same values: the ability to move quickly and decisively to address clients’ needs.”
The Registered Nurse Response Network (RNRN) is a national network of direct-care RNs that coordinates sending volunteer RNs to disaster-stricken areas wherever and whenever they are needed most. The California Nurses Foundation, in conjunction with the National Nurses United, and the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, is building a network of RN volunteers for deployment to Haiti following the devastating earthquake that took place on Jan. 12, 2010.
Those able to support the efforts of these nurses can get involved via the following:
•www.NationalNursesUnited.org—sign up to volunteer or donate
•Follow @NationalNurses on twitter: #haitiRN
•Call the RNRN hotline: 1-800-578-8225
•Support the RNRN/NNU disaster relief effort in Haiti by sending checks c/o California Nurses Foundation, 2000 Franklin St., Oakland, CA 94612. Charitable contributions will be used to pay for travel/related costs and medical supplies for volunteer RNs on their emergency nursing mission in Haiti.
Posted in Ravenflow | 2 Comments »
January 11th, 2010
The most common type of requirements problem, according to Gartner, is missing requirements. Incomplete requirements specifications often result in missed deadlines and rejection of applications at acceptance testing.
Improving communication with all stakeholders can dramatically reduce the number of missed requirements, improving quality and reducing overall time to market.
Attend this FREE webinar to learn more about finding missing requirements during elicitation sessions and during the requirements definition process, as well as solutions for accelerating the requirements development process. Learn how to:
- Identify the most common types of missed requirements
- Accelerate application time to market
- Link business and application development strategies
- Reduce rework costs
- Find missing requirements
This webinar includes a live demonstration of the award-winning RAVEN, winner of the 2009 JOLT Productivity Award!
Posted in Business Use Cases | 6 Comments »
January 11th, 2010
Ravenflow, the leader in Visual Requirements Definition™, today announced an extension of their partnership with Accenture. the world’s largest global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company.
“Our client needed to find a way to accelerate requirements validation without increasing staff,” said Susan Boers, president and CEO of Ravenflow. “They had invested in requirements analysis solutions, but had not seen the expected benefits in improving consultant efficiency, speed, and accuracy.”
“RAVEN addressed the client’s requirements challenges—in the first few days of using RAVEN, they received an immediate return on investment by reducing weeks of estimated work to a finished specification in just 1 day. We continue to see these dramatic savings time and time again.”
Using RAVEN, consultants and other team members rapidly visualize and validate requirements, build team consensus, and produce clear specifications of their business process workflows, business use cases, and business application needs. Based upon patented language processing technology, RAVEN allows business people to describe their needs in plain English, then automatically identifies missing requirements while generating visual process and use case diagrams that all stakeholders can understand. With its distinctive business orientation and process-based approach to requirements definition, RAVEN is uniquely suited for use on both enterprise process improvement and application development projects.
Posted in Agile Business Analysis, Ravenflow | 1 Comment »
December 18th, 2009
A Seamless Transition from Business Requirements Through Implementation
Every few years, new technology makes an advance in capability that enables more efficient development processes. This webinar describes the ICONIX Business Modeling Roadmap — a process that combines two advances in tools capability to enable a quantum leap in development processes, automating time-consuming steps in business modeling and requirements elicitation, and eliminating errors in translation in the enforcement of business rules. The Business Modeling Roadmap enables business applications that provably meet their requirements to be built quickly and efficiently, while avoiding analysis paralysis.
You’ll learn:
• How to identify business requirements using narrative business process scenarios and automatically generated activity diagrams
• How to define business rules and automatically generate algorithmic code for their enforcement, without programming
• How to identify software use cases for “automatable” business processes and drive these use cases forward all the way to code
• How to model the problem domain, and why this is fundamentally important to all of the above steps
• Lessons learned from a case study of a system redesign and implementation at a major healthcare company (anonymity requested to protect the guilty)
Presenter: Doug Rosenberg founded ICONIX in 1984 in order to apply best practices in analysis and architecture to real world software development. Doug has written five books on Software Engineering, most recently “Use Case Driven Object Modeling – Theory and Practice” and currently has two additional titles under development.
Watch it now!
Posted in Agile Business Analysis | 1 Comment »